These Are All Warnings That You Will Likely Forget
by The Hart and Hound
Summary: She could feel the blade of his katana more easily than the palm of his hand on her face. [Eight years after the Uchiha massacre, Mikoto wakes up. ItachiMikoto, Uchihacest.]
1. Beautiful and Trembling With Life

Title: These Are All Warnings That You Will Likely Forget (1 of ?)

Author: tsubaki-hana

Series: Naruto

Rating: M

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Kishimoto Masashi

Summary: She could feel the blade of his katana more easily than the palm of his hand on her face. (Eight years after the Uchiha massacre, Mikoto wakes up. Itachi/Mikoto, Uchihacest.)

- - - - -

Warnings: They apply. There's a substantial amount of graphic incest between a son and mother in this. If this is squicky for you, kindly change back to the previous page. You have been properly warned.

I'm going off the idea of Mikoto surviving her injuries. Don't comment and tell me that she is dead. The stupid . . . it burns my hands, you see, and I have run out of money to comfort myself from it.

- - - - -

- - - - -

The last thing she remembers seeing before it goes strangely quiet (_are you both blind and deaf?_) is that her hands are heavy against the floorboards like stones, and that if she turns her head just so, she can hear the creakings of the dirt and plaster in the house's foundation beneath her as though gravity were pulling her down into the ground, where a corpse like herself really belongs. There are rattlebone hands that scrape against the walls, and she can feel their raking nails from in here, tearing at her skull and neck because she is the last of living -warm- things on the ground (_the one above you does not count; there is no heat in -that- living thing_).

Sprawled across her is Fugaku, and he is already dead because his blood is like ice that cracks on her apron with little fractals that are seeking out the weaknesses of her flesh. She imagines that if she does not suffocate on her own bile first, then she will drown in all that is left of her husband. The pool is moving steadily closer to her own.

Above her stands Itachi, and he is as remorseless as she imagined he would be, blade held in one hand and what she suspects is probably some scroll or another in the other hand. He is a shadow of a god right now, conquering in the starkness of a lunatic moon. It throws him into sharp contrast, a form of black and white and no color, as though it has already drained from him with each strike and bloodletting.

She wants to ask why, but it comes out as a gurgle.

He must hear, because his feet soon draw close in her vision, and she waits. She waits because the blade must fall again, perhaps this time to sever her head from her neck where she will look at the ceiling from dead deer eyes, black and wide and so very trusting.

He carefully pushes her eyelids closed, trailing gore-covered fingertips from her brows to her chin in a ghost touch and against common sense, she turns into it, the last feeling of softness in a life unfilled with children's hand and gentle, sloppy kisses (_because your children don't kiss you; you're their mother, and that has no meaning to a shinobi_). This hand, it is a macabre kiss of its own, because Itachi would not ever get close enough to someone for anything more than this.

She is the first, and pulls this to her throbbing, broken rib and muscle caged heart.

They linger this way for a moment, and she says her goodbyes with lips that rise and fall at the corners, because she really doesn't know whether or not to be happy (_he is touching you of his own free will, not flinching a shoulder away_) or to be indescribably sad (_you will not meet again, not for some time_). By all accounts she ought not feel anything; she ought to be dead.

She almost cries when he stands away from her, watching her eyelashes twitch under each spasm she has, each labored breath, and each hemorrhage of her still breathing lungs. Mikoto is short of breath, and she knows that this is what Itachi is hoping for; he wants her to die soon.

Mikoto also knows that they would be telling the story wrong if Sasuke came in, the young broken hero, and found that someone was still alive. She is still enough of a mother to know how to weave a tale, and that is exactly what her eldest child is doing. Itachi is building to a resounding climax of his opening act now, and like a good (_something that you aren't_) mother, she will let him finish.

Once upon a time and happily ever after dies on her lips.

Everything in between is caught in Sasuke's screaming.

- - - - -

- - - - -

1

- - - - -

So wake up and run your lips across your fingers until you find

some scent of yourself that you can hold up high

to remind yourself that you didn't die.

-Neutral Milk Hotel

- - - - -

It is the ANBU cleanup crew that finds her first, breathing still under the weight of her dead husband, though just barely as though afraid to stir up the dust with the small puffs of air. It takes them an hour to extricate her from underneath Fugaku, especially since her clothes have sealed themselves to the floor, and an additional half an hour before a medic ever makes it to her side to check her for wounds.

There were supposed to be no survivors. There had been no need for a medic.

"A regular Jane Doe," says one medic, wiping the blood from her face with rough swipes while another works to correct her ribs. It is not that the medic does not want to be gentle, but that the blood is so caked on that nothing less will clean her off. "Surprising that she's alive though, considering the damage done."

"They said they found her in the main house, which means that this is probably Uchiha Mikoto," says the other, hands raw with blue chakra that sews her back together like a rag doll that's missing most of its stuffing. The look the medic gives suggests that she feels sorry for the Uchiha matron. "Tough little woman, even though she just barely made it to jounin level. I don't think she wanted to be a ninja at all."

"Well, she won't have to now. As a matter of fact, judging from her response level, she'll probably never have to do much of anything," says the first sadly, pulling a little at the collar of the purple dress. "She's catatonic, low chance of revival. Probably won't ever wake up again, so there would be no point in telling the boy. It would just get his hopes up."

"Who, Uchiha Sasuke?"

"No, the other one, you ass," says the first, voice laced with poor humor. "Yes, I mean Sasuke-kun! I know that it's the Hokage's call on whether or not he is to be told, but I don't recommend it." With one stray hand, the medic passes thin, veined hands through the tangled mess of Mikoto's hair, catching on the knots and nests that refused to be undone. "We're essentially cleaning up a warm corpse to put in a tomb of a hospital room."

"We couldn't just leave her here," says the other, looking helpless.

"I know. But I still feel much crueler this way."

It is the orderlies of a small mental hospital that first remove her from her brown-but-once-violet dress, where her body is lying out in a blue nightgown like a gangly branch, all the angles pointing the wrong way and joints swollen and black with bruising. The left side of her face, where rakish fingers once traced, is a web of small scratches. It is inexplicable, because there's nothing to suggest that she was ever harmed there.

When they put their fingers over it, they can feel her heartbeat stronger than in her wrists. The orderlies do not touch her face if they can help it.

They cut her hair, as though it were made of wicked vines that might smother, clipping it to the base of her neck and around her ears so that she would not suffocate in her (_gasping death_) sleep, but all the same, soon she is a part of her hospital bed mattress, her heartbeats measured in a careful, painfully slow beats and her only sustenance coming through a tube in her stomach and another in her blue wrist.

The hospital staff considers her a waste of space, so they make it a point to stick her in a small room with little light, as though if they left her long enough out of the sun and out of the mind, maybe she would just disappear into the linoleum floors and not-so-sterile steel. She will not protest because she has no words to speak, or thought to make them. They appreciate her compliance.

The other patients, some crazier than others, think of her as something of a broken vessel; the exterior is beautiful, even if it is in pieces, and it would be a shame to throw it away. So instead Mikoto gathers dust like some forgotten Madonna, and they talk about her in muttered voices, as though if they rose their voices she might be roused.

One tries to rouse her by yelling, a young woman with blonde hair and tired eyes. She stands in front of the door for hours, screaming herself hoarse. The hospital staff doesn't stop her screaming for a few hours, but they do ask why she does it at all. She smiles, pretty and coquettish in her youth, and says, "To see who could last longer. I wanted to know if she could stay quiet longer than I could be noisy." The other patients laugh at this, and some of the orderlies, but the pretty blonde does not and instead stares at the frosted pane of glass in the door, half expecting to see a hand silhouetted in the light.

One patient, an old man of particular note, for he was crazier than most but more intelligent than any other, takes to sitting by her in the late afternoon, not quite at the point of sundown, but just as the gold hits the curtains and throws her room into yellow butter light, warm and just a few feet away from her.

"Somebody's got to be missing you," he says, holding her withering hand. "They say that they're all dead, those people of yours, but I know better. I know one of them is got to be missing you, somehow, someway, even if they are already dead to you. That's what you're waiting for."

And every afternoon, rubbing one arthritic thumb over the top of her hand and swallowing down to his cancerous stomach, he says, "Someone will take you home someday, because all lost queens like yourself have a tower and an empire waiting for you." He looks contemplative, before adding, "No one's coming for me, 'cept maybe God, because I'm old and my story is over. I don't even have my children anymore. I have to hope that there will be someone for you."

Trading one lifetime for another, he puts all his hopes in the remnant of a woman with nothing but hollow spaces for a mind. He dies in her third year in the hospital, walking up the stairs to see her from a cardiac arrest. She'll never even know his name, because she doesn't even know what he looks like on the other side of her thick eyelids and heavy sleep.

What he doesn't know is that all her someone's are her villains, and that she does not want them.

No one else bothers visiting. In that body, no one is supposed to be home.

- - - - -

It was foolish to think that one Uchiha Sasuke would never hear of Mikoto in the hospital, not a boy who was so thorough in his search for his brother. Seven years passed from the time of the fall of their clan, another traitor was made, and still she lays asleep in the small amber afternoon room, unmoving and unchanging in her ill-fitting skin.

It's the year that he turns fourteen that he finally bothers to visit. Orochimaru tells him things, and he is receptive to the poisoned words, looking at last in her direction with not something like hope, but with something like a child's love gone to seed. At the foot of her bed, he stands, white and tall against the greys and yellows of the room that afternoon.

No one recognizes him. The hospital is distanced enough from Konoha that no one really cares what happens to the small woman on the west side of the third floor.

"I don't see what the difference is," he says, looking to her face and finding nothing to recognize save for a passing resemblance to the person he once knew. "They made it sound like you weren't dead, that you would still be able to see me or say something, but this . . . this is just disgraceful. I don't even know why they force your body to keep breathing." He chews his bottom lip until it bleeds and drips on the sheets in front of him, ripe against the starched weave. It follows the threads in careful lines, spreading.

"He's sick," he says, gasping for breath, "he's left something behind to mock me again. It's . . . he . . . he should die, he's going to die," his voice gathers its strength, "and I am going to come back and finish what he was too cowardly to do himself. I won't let you just wither away into nothing. I'll . . . make sure you don't have to linger here for much longer."

Sasuke chokes on the air of the room. "I can't stand to look at you."

He leaves with no other word, and does not come back.

Mikoto twitches a finger, her body wanting to pull his head to her chest and whisper apologies like she had done so many times before as a mother to her child. Even if her mind cannot remember, the ache in her arms and the cradle of her hips (_barren now, you know, because they had to make it where you would have no more children_) tell her what to do. Being a mother had been the only thing she had wanted in her youth, and she had given up everything else about her in order to become one.

The heart monitor skips a beat when something inside her realizes she's a mother to no one now.

- - - - -

It is desolate and hot all at once in the remaining vacancy, with no old men with words of wisdom taken as insanity, and there are no little coquettish girls to try and summon her with wordless screams, and above all else there are no young sons to comfort with incapable arms and legs. It is perhaps this that drives Mikoto out of the hollow places of her mind, tracing with old memory the touch of a thirteen-year old's fingers on her soft blood-wet skin.

She is like stone, and she feels as though she weighs as much when she first begins her first strings of consciousness, twitching eyelids that feel like steel traps while her eyes roll dryly from beneath them. It is painful, and if she thinks about it, she can imagine the scraping sound it would make of flesh against flesh.

Her fingers dig weakly into the sheets when she moves her tongue, thick and stuck to the roof of her mouth, to form words, but none come out, and instead she breathes heavily against the force of her own infirmity.

It only takes a few moments for her to begin remembering things, like the way a katana was pointed at her chest not so long ago (_it has been ages, and you don't know it yet_), or that laundry day is on Friday, and that really, how many times was Itachi going to forget to take his shoes off before walking into the living room and this time they are leaving prints, dark metallic red ones that smell of . . .

She vomits, pulling weak arms up to grab at her much too short hair and wide eyes, shaking like the branches over her window at home, the way that the wind used to tear at them and push them down to the roof. Next to her, the heart monitor beats a quick taboo into her mind with uneven rhythm, saying over and over again that this is the end, that was the end, and there will be a new end coming soon.

She wonders why Itachi did not finish her off, just kill her like everyone else and make a clean affair of everything like he would normally have done. She also thinks of fleeting fairytale endings (_the ones that you never get because they're meant for people who aren't real_), and how Sasuke's must be going.

The heart monitor must have set off some sort of alert, because soon enough, Mikoto finds herself being fretted over by two nurses and a doctor, speaking with words that she doesn't wholly understand, telling her to lie down and take it easy (_and you can't do that, because there's too many unanswered questions and your eyes hurt from disuse, carved away by your self-decay. You've been lying in a box, Mikoto, and now you're just old porcelain and sawdust._)

"Take it easy, Uchiha-san," says the nurse, a woman of dark hair and a round face who looks like she is all business. "You'll rip your life support at the rate you're going."

Mikoto doesn't listen, but instead focuses very hard on the florescent lights above her, glowing dully in the afternoon, and why they look nothing like the lights in the Konoha village hospital. She knows what they ought to look like, with the yellowing ceiling tiles surrounding them and the dead moths trapped inside, and this she ought to know because she spent many hours staring at them when she was pregnant with Sasuke. (_You were too weak to keep him inside you so you had to rely on plastic and sterile hands to do it for you. Fugaku would give you no more children after that_.)

One hand, pleasantly warm unlike the two nurses, clasps over her emaciated shoulder, turning her to face him. The doctor, a man in his late fifties with a kind face and smooth forehead (he looks sort of like your grandfather, but bite your tongue), favors you with a small smile and asks you "Do you know who you are, miss?"

She swallows, not because her mouth is dry, but because there are tears building up behind her eyes, the bitter kind that make her wince at their flavor.

"My mother named me Mikoto because she thought I would be a great person, a woman of lordly words."

It has been eight years, and Mikoto has no way of knowing anything that has happened at all. She doesn't even know if any of her family is still alive, nor any power to fix it.

"I guess she was wrong."

- - - - -

They tell her that she is not allowed to leave the hospital, not until they check things for her or until someone comes to check her out. She cannot check herself out, not after eight years of being in a comatose state. She can't even feed herself, much less take care of herself.

"I would like to speak to Sarutobi-sama," she says in her rasping voice (_Itachi nearly tore your throat out, yet you still don't blame him_), frowning while feeling out her deep eyes with questing fingers, waiting to feel whatever it is that makes her feel that everything is just barely off-balance. There's something wrong with the corners of this room, as though they do not make 90 degree angles, so she shifts uncomfortably, waiting for the bottom to fall out or the ceiling to fall.

The bottom -always- drops out.

The doctor looks stricken, checking her pulse.

"The Sandaime died in a battle two years ago against Orochimaru. I cannot take you to see him, but I can see if the Godaime will speak with you," he says, regretfully rubbing the top of her hand as though to comfort her. She is not comforted, but angered, and childishly bites a lip and snorts. Mikoto will not allow herself to cry, not when she has made it this far without doing it in other people's presence (_you may be a ruler thrown from her throne, but you are still above letting others know your mind. You will not let illness and sleep take this one stability that you have._)

"That will not be necessary."

"But there are things you need to-" he says frustrated. She turns her head, fingers still digging into the ridges of her eye sockets, looking for an answer. None are forthcoming.

"No, thank you."

They do not try to make sense of her, and she is glad that they don't. She doesn't know if she makes sense either. She doesn't want to know whether or not her sons are dead, or if they've sold the Uchiha compound. She doesn't want to know if her old mother passed away from the flu, and she especially doesn't want to know if there is no place left for her in this world, like she should have left it and made things right. Mikoto is not welcome in her own skin, and she is not sure what she can do about it.

(_There's nothing that you can do, because there's nothing left to validate your existence_.)

- - - - -

The days run into each other, remorseless and without event. She does not complain, but she thinks often, wondering at the shape of the stain next her bed and the way that the lights flicker, picking up the patterns of the flickering. There's nothing she wants to do, and no one to see her.

She's heard of the elderly that are without family, sitting in homes and hospitals until there was no will to live left in them. They slipped into obscurity before vanishing entirely. But Mikoto had never seen it happening to her. She was young still when she came here (_even if your flesh was nothing more than a husk_), and she does not know if she will ever reconcile eight years in absentia, eight years that she might have seen her sons grow into their maturity and have children of their own.

She does not feel like she has slept for eight years, but instead centuries. If she must age at all, she wishes it would be drastically, so that she could see nothing of herself anymore, separate what she considered a relatively happy life to this one empty of people and recognition. They call her Uchiha-sama and Uchiha-san, but it feels hollow without the home to go with it.

She never does go to speak with the Hokage, because she barely remembers Tsunade other than the fact she had disappeared to drink everything her grandfather had left her. She did not want to see Tsunade because Tsunade sounded exactly like what Mikoto felt; alone and unable to cope for long without her special people.

(_And your special people aren't going to come back, are they? Even Tsunade has Jiraiya, but you . . . you have a burnt plot of land and a head full of hair that your children had as well. Not much to go off, not much as all you mutter to yourself at night._)

Nothing is breaking up the days, and she is going as mad as everyone else in here because of it.

Until at last, voices carry that aren't meant to be heard.

"Don't you ever get tired of going to these shitty places?"

It is evening, at least two months after when she first awakens. The sun is red and bleeding through the curtains of her window when she first hears them, working their way down the hallway with loud feet and grumbling voices. She does not recognize them, doesn't even feel they have a place in a hospital, and watches nervously from her bed, wondering at the passing shadows across the frosted window. Mikoto is curious, but not enough so to risk drawing attention to herself.

"I just need to body of the old man, and then we can go. It's not worth passing up the fifty thousand ryou that he'll earn us," says a second voice, rumbling and muffled, as though from behind a mask. "If you have such a problem with it, maybe you should just wait outside like you usually do."

"Tch, and let you take twice as long? Which room is it anyway?"

"How should I know? I just know the morgue is on this floor somewhere."

Mikoto's breath catches in her throat, sitting uncomfortably between her lungs and vocal chords, begging for release. She inches one quiet hand toward the nurse call button, her arms shaking horribly against her body. There's no way for her to know if anything will happen if she makes it, but the effort is enough to make a cold sweat break out on her forehead.

Her arm freezes when the handle of her door turns quietly.

In the doorway stands a man, much taller than herself with silver-blonde hair, very unusual and stained dark crimson in the sunlight. The glint of his frigid blue eyes is not so easily overcome by the wandering glow. He smirks, eying her hand that is but three inches away from the call button. The look that crosses her face dares her to do it.

She drops her hand, and narrows her wide eyes at him, lips pulled tight. But unlike what she expects, the look that crosses his face is one of recognition, even though she is fairly certain that she has never seen him before or after her time being comatose. He is younger than she (_even though you don't feel particularly old either_), so she knows that if nothing else, she probably never saw him on a mission from her ninja days (_and how pitiful those were, if you recall correctly, more concerned about your fatalistic fertility than your actual career_.)

"Can I help you?" she asks, feeling a thrill go from the space she calls her heart to the base of her spine.

He is perceptive, because his grin becomes more cocky, as though her voice alone was something of a secret. "Hey," he says from between sneering lips, "what's your name?"

And what does it matter if she uses the name of a dead woman, anyway? It's not like anyone will be coming here for her, not when there's no one left (_that cares. Besides, if you're lucky, maybe someone will kill you and restore things to the way they're meant to be._) She flexes bird bone fingers on the sheets, trying to perceive the purpose of his upturned lips.

"Mikoto. Uchiha Mikoto." Then, with a hesitant glance from the window to his eyes again, she adds, "Why?"

The Cheshire grin of the blonde man is enough to make her regret saying anything.

He turns to leave, but not before she sees him make note of her room number and her face, as though placing another one where hers lies. His amusement is almost physical, and it strikes her as worrisome that he would even know a woman named Uchiha Mikoto to begin with.

"Screw that, Kakuzu. I just found something a whole lot more interesting than your old body bag down the hall."

(_You've forgotten something, and now you'll pay the price for it. How does it feel?_)

She watches them go with wide, all-encompassing eyes.

- - - - -

To be continued

- - - - -

A/N: Woo, the warm-up chapter.

Why do I keep doing this to myself? Aren't three multi chapter fics enough? For obvious reasons, the story will continue. This has been eating at me for a while, so expect more and soon. I'll warn you straight off: Mikoto will get crazier.


	2. She Found a Lonely Sound

Title: These Are All Warnings That You Will Likely Forget (2 of ?)

Author: tsubaki-hana

Series: Naruto

Rating: M

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Kishimoto Masashi.

Summary: She could feel the blade of his katana more easily than the palm of his hand on her face. (Eight years after the Uchiha massacre, Mikoto wakes up. Itachi/Mikoto, Uchihacest.)

- - - - -

Warnings: Still apply.

- - - - -

- - - - -

She is six years old, she remembers, when she first realizes that she wants to nurture things, see them grow and love them unconditionally (_which you do, you loved them without knowing why or how save that you only wanted them to stay warm against your breast where you could hear their rapid heartbeats. They were always soft against you, like they were always meant to be there_.)

It is summer when she realizes this, between her ninja classes, when everyone goes to the sea and the mountains. She goes instead to see her grandmother, who helps the women in the small forest villages with their children and health, but there she sees the mothers' and their arms, always needed and always moving industriously.

They are like birds to her, small and flighty but not as delicate as they seem, always coming back to their homes that would be their nests, filled with things that they think beautiful or necessary. One woman carries a bundle of turnips and a handful of chamomile, and this, Mikoto thinks, would be her string, and the clean laundry her branches to make a home with.

Mikoto is flighty as well, wearing her hair in tight braids, ones that her grandmother into the roots of her scalp with red string and small bells to make sound, something she finds infinitely more comforting than the cicadas and leaves rustling. Her hair is sticky though, because there's a storm coming in from the southern ocean, and the bells are hollow and dead against the nape of her neck. Behind her, beneath the clouds, the small village, very unlike Konoha, stands in grey and yellow light, waiting for the storm to break upon it.

She is hungry, says as much many times during the day, but she is distracted enough by the day's events to stop moving as much as she normally would, twirling one braid tip between white fingers and bitten nails. She coyly looks over to her side, where her grandmother follows behind, unhurried by the storm or summer heat.

"Obaa-san," she begins, tongue lisping against the spaces where her missing baby teeth would have been a few months ago. "When may I have kids like okaa-san?" She thinks of the village women and their arms full of laundry and living things, babies and plants and pets that work harmoniously together. It stirs something in her, a tiny longing that will not mean much yet, but grows.

Mikoto twists nervous little fingers into her hand-me-down yukata that weaves ribbons along her matchstick legs and ankles (_you though it was the best one, because the indigo and yellow ochre fabric made you stand out like a lily in the briar; you were always between the lines_.) Her sandals scuff against the walkway, scattering little stones around her feet and hurting her toes. She keeps her eyes averted, because she knows that her grandmother will tell her that she can't, as though children could never do -anything-.

She thinks it an adult thing, to always be refusing what makes them happy as though it helps somehow. It always seemed to her that they looked more angry and watery eyed.

Her grandmother, a wrinkled old thing with deep set and doe-black eyes (_like your own_) and dirty unshod feet that dig down into the gravel of the road, frowns and steers her by a shoulder to one side of the old house they stay in, the greying wood cracking in the summer's weather, expanding out where it has nowhere else to go. The splinter-like fingers are sharp against her neck, and she can feel her own heartbeat against the yellowed fingernails if she holds still.

"Hmm," her grandmother grumbles, vibrating in her ears, "you are but six years old, Mikoto. Children do not have children of their own."

"Then I must be grown up," she says and nods, pulling at her sleeves and feeling very satisfied. As a child, her resolve is not refutable, not even to adults (_that you will become one of many_). "I will just get older faster, and then it will be all right."

At her side, her old grandmother stops, looking stricken and aged like her house with nowhere to expand to either. The hand loosens a bit and slides off her shoulder, and without knowing why, Mikoto feels as though gravity has lessened itself on her. As a child, she feels as though she ought to jump, just to see how high she can get.

"Why? Why would you want to grow old when you are so very young and -alive-?"

Mikoto turns to her grandmother, halfway prepared to take off in her shoes where she is. "What is it, Obaa-san?" She wonders if she said something wrong. The look of her grandmother's face makes her think of her mother when she and father argue about whether or not Mikoto can keep going to the Academy. It is always very sad looking, like rain rivulets on the mossy stone in the backyard. (_It always looked like an old man to you, with green eyebrows and craggy spaces that got heavier with the passing seasons until it was no longer recognizable, just another stone against the walls_.)

Instead of looking at her, her grandmother looks at one of the bells, beginning to tarnish with dirt and hanging limply from her braid. Everything about her seems to drag down toward the gravel road, from the wrinkles around her eyes to her purple veined hands that clasp at a bundle and a bucket as though life itself depended on it.

Mikoto doesn't realize yet that gravity pulls harder when people get older.

(_But you will later on, when it tries to take you down into the earth. Then you can -really- turn into a lily in the briar; grown from something's remains, wilting in dark places_.)

- - - - -

2

Your mouth is hiding,

you've got joyless eyes

softly contriving

all the terrible things

that shook up our hearts enough

-Mew

- - - - -

She waits for a long time, sheets drawn up to her chin during the night as though half expecting dark shapes to come out of the windows and doors. She does not sleep for fear of being caught off guard. She wants to know when next she can expect the arrogant man in black and red; she has to know which way to throw the syringe she has managed to gather to herself. (_A flu shot, if you recall correctly, but you had been so relieved to see sharp objects that you did not feel the pinch of the vaccine that bruises your arm black; you were always easily marred_.)

Mikoto is perceptive enough to know that the intruders from the evening before do not mean well, and while she may not mind dying, she does mind suffering (_because haven't you had enough?_), and she can imagine a thousand dire things that they could do to make her unhappy.

So she stands in her private vigil until the red lights of her alarm clock shine bright and glaring in her dark room, not at all unlike eyes when she squints in her exhausted night watch. Mikoto ends up turning it around, bothered by the slow passing minutes and rose glow on the white speckled floor.

"Good morning, Uchiha-san," says the nurse on her rounds, long before the sun rises, but despite that she looks perfect in her immaculate white suit and pulled back black hair, the type of woman that looks beautiful and blooms no matter what conditions she is in.

Mikoto puts her fingers to the blackness beneath her eyes, feeling her age and tiredness (_even after an eight-year sleep_), a habit she has developed since waking. She doesn't mean to, but in front of the natural loveliness of the nurse, she feels very homely with her twig wrists and wide, sleepless eyes that open and close in tandem.

"Now, now, you look as if you haven't slept at all," says the nurse ("_Kirie," you add to yourself, memorizing the lines of her face_). "And I don't think that you've taken any medication since yesterday." As an afterthought, Kirie sighs, rustling through the clipboard at the door.

Mikoto frowns a little. "I didn't, and I don't want to. I feel," a lie, "fine."

Kirie must not hear her, because she continues to flip through the clipboard, looking progressively more agitated as the moments drift by. Mikoto is not sure why, but watches with careful slides of her eyes across the room. She has not thought of the Sharingan in many years, but dares not do it now, not when she doesn't know if she can form chakra.

Finally, the nurse sighs angrily, pulling all of Mikoto's charts from the wall container. "I don't know how, or if it's a mistake made by the previous shift, but all your information from the past week is missing."

She startles, and feels the beginnings of unease twist in her stomach, thinking of clever blue eyes that smile at the mention of a name.

"Kirie-chan," she says in her dry river voice, halting on the syllables and struggling with her once smooth tones. (_Good thing you can't have children, because you sound monstrous, dying. You couldn't sing a lullaby or a screaming swan song, depending on the occasion, and somewhere in the world you feel that someone is grateful for your silence_.)"Do you know who those men were last night? The ones that were looking for the morgue?"

For a long time, the nurse fills out charts, acting as though she didn't hear with one hand on a fountain pen and a second picking at the fibers of her cardigan, a red one that is a stain on the grey and blue of her nighttime filled room. However, when the cooler kicks on to chill the room, she puts down the charts and looks at her, warily.

"They do not come often, but none of us will try to stop them if they do. There . . . " Kirie pauses, looking for the right words. "There is no harm in it, since they never want anyone living and always leave without any fuss . . . barring complaining of course, but I hear a lot of that in a hospital."

"Then you're saying that they show up regularly," she says, twisting sheets between her fingers, trying to unravel the hem.

"No," says Kirie, chewing on a piece of hair. "But there are a lot of old shinobi and kunoichi here. When they get old, they don't see things the way that everyone else does, so Konoha sends them to us to keep watch on in their," she hesitates on the word, "madness and illness. A lot of them are worth a lot of money, even when they die."

Mikoto flinches, twisting strands on uneven shorn hair between her bitten nail hands. "You . . . sell their corpses then. Or just give them away."

Kirie does not respond, but signs the paperwork with a brilliant series of swipes in kanji, sealing the conversation away with a passing black streak. "Don't worry about it. They've only taken dead people . . . It's not like anyone was coming for them anyway."

The look that the young nurse gives her reminds her of the youth of that form, and all the naivete and desensitized feelings that Kirie might have once had before she dipped them in chloroform. Mikoto wonders if her own haven't sterilized in the absence of people.

Mikoto does not like to think that she is in a mental institution because she is quite certain that she is not crazy, and she does not like to think that she is in a hospital because that would mean that she is unhealthy and possibly curable (_as though being orphaned, widowed, and barren were somehow treatable with a prescription_).

She wonders if they'll take her back to her home where Itachi left her to bleed and rot into the woodwork. No matter what the nurse says, she is quite certain that she is already dead (_and has been for eight years_). The only problem is that she is technically still breathing.

- - - - -

A week passes, and the hospital staff never does find her records.

She tells them not to bother looking, because they've been taken. They give her looks that suggest that they think she is as crazy as the others down the hall, and despite her protests, she finds herself on more drugs than she has ever been on in her life. Her periods of lucidity begin to cut down, to be replaced by strangely shaped dreams and nightmares that look like they're being seen through a dirty window and that she can't see anyone's faces clearly.

It horrifies her, because how is she supposed to watch the windows when she can barely turn her head? She is vulnerable, declawed and dysfunctional and wholly incapable of thinking for herself and making decisions.

"It's not necessary," says the kindly doctor that she cannot remember the name of. "You're not treating an illness this way."

"We're keeping her comfortable," says the head nurse, standing in her scrubs next to Mikoto, trying to situate the unruly black hair that sticks to Mikoto's forehead from being crushed into her face by a pillow. Mikoto, hatefully, grudges the fingers that try and rake through her hair. (_It's much too intimate a touch to belong to anyone other than her husband and children, and you are not asking for comfort, you are asking for that you will not get in a haze of narcotics_.) "In a day or two we'll run the basics on her and see what we can do. For now, we don't know what is going on in her body or mind."

It is not comforting at all, and Mikoto wants nothing more than to roll off the bed and out the door. She might gather some dirt and bruises, but at least she wouldn't be nothing but a body taking up bed space.

- - - - -

When they do finally take her off all drugs, she finds that she is in more pain than she could possibly bear, and begs them to give the narcotics back. The doctor and nurses look at each other, confused but will not change their decision. She will have to learn to live on her own, they say, sounding wise and ugly all at once to her, cruel to always withhold what she needs when she actually has a use for it.

It is at night that she feels it most potently, rolling back and forth as well as she can, anything to distribute the ache evenly. Her heart is a bird beating against its rib cage prison, the lights dance, and she, slightly delirious with unhappiness, curses everything around her. She could not watch for intruders if she wanted to. She isn't able to see three feet in front of her before it all greys out into a shapeless wasteland of plastic and steel.

Tonight, or rather in the dusk, she is frustrated almost to tears, biting one corner of her lip until it is raw and chapped. The skin broken paints red onto her dull teeth. She would stand if she could, if only to give her body a focus, a point of attack that is not all-consuming. Instead, she has to settle for a seat with a view. They moved her bed so that she could look out the window.

Her eyes weren't what they once were, and Mikoto wonders if Itachi didn't do that on purpose, to make sure that his victims (_family_) couldn't strike him back unless he had permitted it so, like he was some sort of God. Whether from disuse or from macabre adolescent hands, she cannot focus properly like she once could, and it is this more than anything that makes her feel antiquated and useless. In a clan like the Uchiha, vision is everything, and without it, you are a weapon with no blade or a dog with no teeth. (_You've been hoping against your better sense that it will recover, that one day you'll open your eyes and things will come into focus, even if nothing else fixes itself. You were never greedy with anyone but your sons, so you have sworn with brutally honest lips that you will not be disappointed_.)

Beneath her, three floors down, she can see the ground, almost black in the dying sunlight. It turns the grass brown in its last moments, throwing the trees in sharp blackened contrast, the individual leaves making a wave of flickering with each passing breeze. It is hypnotic, and against better sense, she finds herself sleeping while sitting upright, head lulling to the side bonelessly.

What light there is left is warm, and it is this that puts Mikoto into her drowsed state, sending her eyelids down like shutters and her mouth to yawning. She still doesn't understand why she wants to sleep at all, especially after so long of doing nothing else. She fights it with a sharp rap of her knuckles on the metal rail of her bed, setting her iv to rattling against its confines.

Mikoto, feeling the vibration of the metal and light heat from the sun, knows that she is lonely, but will not say so to herself. To admit it would be to create a need, and that need, she knows, will never be fulfilled.

Mikoto knows that in her personal mission to become a mother and wife, she forsook all others that might have been once friends for the sake of herself and the illustrious clan's demands of her. As a matriarch, there is no time for chatting on the back porch in the evening or sitting for tea on a rainy day. It wasn't even that she tried to chase them away so much as they never saw each other until it didn't matter when they did.

For her, Fugaku, Itachi, and Sasuke had been all the company that she ever needed, always giving her a reason to be needed, some sort of calling that kept her going through the day until she had convinced herself that she was necessary for them.

Without them, she wants to fill the gaps with something, but she suspects that she might not have anything left to put there.

The sunlight puts her to sleep, sitting by the window and half-alert as though waiting for people to come down the path from Konoha to bring her home from the hospital, just like it was with Sasuke. She doesn't want to know if it's wrong, because it's the only thing she can think of to help her sleep. Besides, she doesn't know how to sleep when everything hurts so much.

- - - - -

Mikoto wakes with a start, looking into a royal sky of purples and fading pinks, the only thing left from a sunset that must have happened only an hour or so before. There's nothing left of the ground to be seen, save for the passing shadows of people walking home after visiting hours. All of them leave the hospital, lonely little shades that disappear onto the forest's paths, never to be seen again in the light of this day.

However, it is not this that catches Mikoto's attention, but the vague steps on the hallway tiles from outside, heavy and swift, perhaps two or more people. Her first thought is that it is time for rounds again and that the nurse will be here soon with some simple foods for her to try and eat again, just like they've been trying for the past week. (_You don't eat much at all, as though if you could you would starve yourself and not mark time by the times at which you have meals or pills_.)

The familiar grumbling tells her otherwise, and she clenches the sheets between her fingers again, half wondering if she could try to pull them up over her head and hide, never to be seen again in the ambiguous shapes that make up her room. One eye remains resolutely focused on the frosted glass panel, trying to perceive what could be beyond it.

"I'm so fuckin' tired of those stairs," says the voice of what could only be the arrogant crooked man from the week before, only his feet have always been light and there are far more sounds this time, whether it is the shuffle of cloaks or the chinking of metal on metal. Beneath her pillow, she clutches her empty syringe, filling it with air.

There is scoffing laughter, and this voice is deep and gravelly like the jagged sea floor.

"This was your idea," says the gravelly voice, "so it's not my fault if you just keep coming up with stupid shit to keep yourself entertained with. Just be happy we agreed to come at all."

"Tch," says the snide man again, and she can almost hear the smirk in his voice, lifting one proud lip up. "I didn't have to tell you at all, so why don't you thank me instead of all this mightier-than-thou crap. God, it smells like bleach in here."

"Hidan, you're wasting my time, bringing us back here. We got the bounty, so let's move on. I trust that these two can take care of themselves without adult supervision." This one she recognizes as the masked one, the one with the eyes like gold coins. But what he says fills her with a shock of fear; there are at least two more.

Twitching a foot, she knows that there's no way that she could stand up in the event of an emergency.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence, Kakuzu, but we'll take it from here." The gravelly voice again. But it trails off, she realizes, when the door opens, very slowly and the silver-haired man sticks his head in to look around. The others are silent, waiting.

"You guys are too noisy. She's sitting in here listening," he says, smiling at her in a way that is not at all pleasant. She flexes fingers on the syringe, trembling with contained anxiety. "Yo, you should speak up next time you have guests. It's rude to leave them outside." For whatever reason, he stops smiling and glances behind him, looking not apologetic but finished, as though he has said too much.

Mikoto shifts, uncertain, and tries to incline herself enough to look around the door behind him, but there is nothing other than a dimly lit hallway and a couple of black figures. Her breath, however, is tight in her chest, as if someone were stepping on it, filling her with the need to get -out-. She doesn't know where, so long as it is not -here-.

Whatever it is behind Hidan, it moves with liquid shadow grace, faster than she can follow with eyes that don't focus. She suspects that whoever it is, they are moving deliberately slow. Her hand grasps around the handle of the syringe, waiting for her opportunity. She doesn't know what it is that she fears, suffice that she -does- fear, and that is quite enough to lash out against.

When the moving darkness is close enough, she pulls her arm up as quickly as she can, forcing all other functions stop for this moment. The movement is clumsy, but it is fast, and that is enough for her.

Her visitor is fast too, and in a moment of horror, she sees her arm being forced to drive the needle tip through her left inner thigh. She doesn't scream, but her eyes are blank and wide as she shakes under the piercing pressure, holding gasps back in her throat with clenched eyes and a leg so tense that she feels out every vein under her skin like a web waiting to be shaken away.

"Shh," says a smooth male voice, melodious in a way that her voice might have been several years ago. "You needn't be so hasty."

To her complete mortification, she feels her hand pried away from the remainder of the syringe and her legs nudged open with one insistent hand that grabs the syringe and pulls, while the other grabs her bare thigh and holds her still. (_This is wrong, and you know it, because there has only been one who has ever touched you like that, and he is dead_.) She shakes against him, eyes dry and pale with pain that look up into a face she cannot see, obscured by long black hair and a tall coat collar. He ignores her and eases the needle out of her leg with one drawn out movement of his hand.

The hand that holds her leg down trails to the blood from the small wound, pulling at the slim trail with fingers that are spider thin and chill. The minute he moves his hand, she snaps her legs closed, ignoring the pain it causes. The humiliation she feels is almost a thing of physical weight, landing somewhere between her chest and throat and choking her (_and you deserve it, you deserve it because somewhere inside you know you wanted the contact and you are sick for it_).

His bloody hand, while she is not paying attention, comes to rest on her right cheek at the base of her eye and traces dark trails from there to her jaw, and it is then that she can see in the shadows of his face the one that she has both feared and hoped to see, the last remnant of a life gone by in a lunatic moon and sleep that followed after.

"It's been a while, haha-ue. I didn't believe them when they said you were here at first." Her son's voice is nonchalant, fingers like pinchers at her jaw, -bruising-, hurting, and making certain she looks at him. (_You do not think you could look away if you wanted to, not when he is before you with your head pressed into his chest and your arm withheld by crane fingers_.) "But I wonder . . . how it is that you would survive."

She wonders too, because with his hawkish red eyes looking at her again, she can feel the blade of his katana more easily than his hand on her face.

- - - - -

To Be Continued

- - - - -

A/N: Thighs are sexier than hips.

This fic is really going to require its own fan soundtrack soon, because this is the best collection I have ever listened to while writing. If you guys are interested, I'll try to set up some direct downloads somewhere. This chapter, however, has Interpol's "Narc" written all over it in black and red.

Thanks to everyone who has reviewed so far! It makes my day to get comments. Next time I'll try to respond on an individual basis (like I do at my livejournal posts). Comments and constructive criticism are always well received, and I will appreciate it if I get f-list beta comments.


	3. Sewing Lace On Widows Weeds

Title: These Are All Warnings That You Will Likely Forget (3 of ?)

Author: tsubaki-hana

Series: Naruto

Rating: M

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Kishimoto Masashi.

Summary: She could feel the blade of his katana more easily than the palm of his hand on her face. (Eight years after the Uchiha massacre, Mikoto wakes up. Itachi/Mikoto, Uchihacest.)

- - - - -

Warnings: Yep, they still apply.

- - - - -

- - - - -

When Mikoto first becomes pregnant, things do not work out the way that they are supposed to. As a matter of fact, they are completely different from the happy picture that she has steadily painted for herself ever since she was a small child, as though her thoughts were colors and her dreams a paintbrush for them, and it comes as a disappointment for herself and her husband, Uchiha Fugaku.

She marries Fugaku because her mother and father make it so, tampering with the idea of engagement while she is away on a mission in the Water Country, writing contracts and making promises on behalf of their unmarried daughter. (_Remember that when you first came home, you broke your mother's best tea service in your anger, just wanting for something other than you to make shattering noises. You want children, not to be nobility and responsible for so many other people, and you felt your dreams suddenly leaving your control, rearranging themselves to meet someone else's needs_.)

"Fugaku-kun is a nice man," says her mother, sharp and prim in manner with her fingers steepled like blade tips. "He's only a few years older than you, so you should have enough in common." (_Enough in common, as though that makes up for a lifetime of being strangers_.) Mikoto has to restrain herself from jerking her head away from her mothers hands that absent-mindedly pass through her hair, as though somehow trying to be comforting. "He'll take care of you. You said you wanted children, and he actually _needs_ them, so it should all work out, ne?"

"Your mother and I are in agreement on this," says her father, polishing his spectacles in his shaking hands, stained yellow from tobacco and harsh chemicals; he is a leather tanner for shinobi equipment (_nothing so elegant as a clan head or an infamous ninja, but _someone _has to do the work that makes those people what they are_.) "Besides, it is best that you will not have to be an active kunoichi anymore. Jounin or not, you worry us."

She meets Fugaku that night, knocking her thin knuckles against the wood panel of the main house. There is no forthcoming answer for her, and for a long time she just knocks, not really wanting to be heard but desperate for the explanation all the same. It is dusky purple around her, and she is grey against the rich wood of the building, as though it has already refused to acknowledge her as its future lady of the house.

It takes an hour before anyone ever comes to answer her, and even then, it is not from inside the house. Behind her, walking down the path comes Fugaku, his father, and her own father, looking very severely at one another. They don't notice her in the shadows straight off, but soon Fugaku looks her way with keen eyes.

"I came to ask a question," she says.

"I will give you an answer." He says it so absolutely that for a moment Mikoto is positive that everything will be all right, that maybe this man who she has never stood in the same room with for more than a few moments really _will_ know how to make things better. (_He always was someone you could lean against, because never have you met someone who was so bent upon his will_

_being obeyed that it seemed that if he wished for rain or sun, the clouds would gather and disperse_.)

"What do you want of me, exactly?"she asks, ignoring the indignant looks that their fathers give her, and she can hear them name her an unruly woman without speaking it aloud. She has to know, because there are things that she wants for herself, and she does not know if there is enough for others. Mikoto will be selfish, and she does not care for this moment.

Fugaku takes his time answering, unmoving in his shadow, even so motionless as to not breathe noticeably, restraining all motion. She watches him closely from the front door for a long time before meeting his eyes with weary ones of her own. He does not smile, nor does he frown, but puts one bear-like hand on her shoulder, barely touching her at all as though afraid to show any intimacy at all despite the importance of the moment.

"Only what you are willing to offer."

They are married in the early spring, when the plum tree that is beside her childhood window is in its finest white dress of blossoms. Mikoto wears no ornamental flowers of her own (_though you did argue with your mother to place a sprig of rosemary into your hair, "for my memory," you had said_), feeling very green and fruitless in her bridal uchikake. She hopes that Fugaku is not offended when she winces at the bitterness of the sake they share during the ceremony.

It becomes something of a routine after their wedding night to sit down to an awkward dinner and then melt away the ice with passionless kisses that do not mean love so much as offering each other's closeness (_something you are willing to part with for him_). After all, if they kiss, they might be able to make a man-made forgery of love. It lacks the significance, but at least it fills the gallows of their hearts, swinging feelings back and forth until they fall together (_like you want_) or choke on the noose of duty. Her girlish fantasy of romance and intimacy is fading underneath the musty smell of sex and the new expensive perfume that Fugaku buys her during their first week of marriage. (_"Juniper and holly berry," he says to you, "because it eases pain."_)

"It will get better," he says to her one night, lying next to her with a sheen of sweat on his upper lip, drawing her eyes to his thin, often severe, mouth.

She laughs, and feeling very clever, asks, "Do you mean the sex or the marriage?"

He does not find it funny like she does, not the way that she can laugh hollowly with her fingers laced over her belly and a million expectations running through her head. Now that it is her responsibility to be a matriarch to a family, she is having to relearn everything. With the thousand tiny demands pushing against her, she is not sure if _anything_ will ever get better.

Fugaku pulls her closer, and puts her head beneath his chin, feeling her heart that is pressed against his chest beating.

It does not surprise her when she conceives for her first time in April, the news coming to her while she stands in front of a physician and thinks that the words are slightly off, buzzing in her ear like she has been told a lie. Her hands shake when she comes home, nervously cutting vegetables in the wrong direction, cutting her fingers.

When Fugaku comes home and asks what's wrong, she says nothing and never _will_ say anything. Mikoto cannot say why, but she does not want him to know.

She miscarries in early May, when Fugaku finds her sitting in the bottom of the shower, letting her clothes and hair soak through as she bleeds out her unborn child. The soap that she holds in her hands slides nervelessly to the drain, and she follows it with sad eyes. He, leaning against the door, climbs in with her and helps her out of the stained and sopping cotton shift, pulling her face to lie in the crook of his neck.

"I'm sorry," she says quietly.

"Don't be," he says, and like that, he is confident again, and it is as if it should all be well again.

Only it isn't. It doesn't stop her from feeling like she ought to apologize and that it is her fault. She thinks that perhaps if she had tried harder for him that it wouldn't be like this, or that her body is a traitor to her desire to be a mother and that some infirmity of her character causes this. She wants for him to hate her so that she will want to please him. (_In hindsight, you feel much worse, wondering if things would have been different had you birthed that first child instead of Itachi, so that your lovely boy would not have suffered all the criticisms of being first born_.)

In her enthusiasm to make things right, she conceives again after she has healed in September and does everything that she ought to do as a wife and mother. She considers herself less and less, and she is happy with that because now she can fix her dreams to include her husband, not just the soft baby faces that she has hoped for.

(_Perhaps everything is your fault after all_.)

- - - - -

3

She knew your devils and your deeds

And she said

Color go to him, stay if you can

Oh, but be prepared to bleed.

-Joni Mitchell

- - - - -

She doesn't know what to think, suffice to say that there is a measurable emptiness in her as her head is pressed into the side of his bony hip, where her skull feels pressured so strongly that there is a click of a calcium frame against another. Mikoto feels as though she is being smothered, but cannot resist. Instead, she looks up where she can see the thin locks of Itachi's hair, disguising whatever expression he has on his face.

Her breath is tight in her throat, the way it would be if his hand were around her throat. She has never met another who held a stronger presence of terror than her own son, and she isn't sure if that is anyone's doing other than a sense of irony that blesses her with the opposite of her expectations. What is of more concern to her is that she shakes to the point of not being able to look him straight in the face, instead averting her eyes to the syringe that lies bloody on the side table.

If she were not so weak and sick, she is positive that she would try to kill him again, if only to make her stomach stop doing back flips and seeing her husband and family fall to the ground like they were straw men and oh God, her side is tearing open and it hurts, it hurts it hurts it hurts (_how lovely your eyes are, Mikoto! All the better to deliberately not see with, my dear!_)...

Itachi evades her nausea and vomit with a deft spin of his torso, jerking her head to hang over the side of the bed and away from his feet. His fingers in her clipped hair are talons against her skull, and if she listens she can hear the nails scrape against her spinal cord.

Mikoto has not eaten a real meal in years, so all that she feels force itself away are blood, water and acid, something that reminds her of her days of morning sickness, not daring to eat so much as a bowl of white rice. However, it feels inappropriate in this moment. She had only felt this nausea when it was Sasuke she was pregnant with.

Itachi had felt like he was trying to tear his way out.

"That's not the right way to greet your son, haha-ue. We haven't spoken in several years," he says, as if this was exactly what needed to be said. Beyond her illness and fear, Mikoto knows that Itachi does not play with people. It is likely that he really expects her to politely say hello to him or that he is being venomous in his sarcasm (_and you wonder if he does the same to everyone else, even after all that has happened. You wouldn't put it past him, not just yet when you have only now seen him_.)

He directs her blue face, speckled with popped vessels from vomiting, to look at him properly. For a moment she is positive that he will use a doujutsu, and that she is finished. An illusion, she thinks, because then it would mean that I will die and that none of this will have to ever be real.

"You're very thin," he says, tracing a gaunt cheek with his white fingers. "But that is to be expected, since you've been sleeping for such a long time."

"Are you going to kill me or not?" she asks impatiently, her voice hoarse and weak. He looks at her in a disquieting way, irritated at the interruption. She bravely (_not really, but you'd like to think so_) carries on. "I had been expecting that other pair to come and take me away, bounty or some such nonsense that the nurse talks about."

"Hardly," says Itachi, sidestepping the acrid mess on the floor and pushing her back against the bed to look at him properly. "Hidan and Kakuzu would not benefit from a bounty that is expired by several years."

Sweating, watching his hands, she smiles wryly. "Friends of yours?"

He says nothing, instead looking around the room with a detached interest, eyes especially attentive on the heart monitor. Mikoto is embarrassed by the quick rhythm of it, a visible and audible reminder of her fear. Itachi almost seems amused by it, tapping one finger to the pattern against the rail of her bed. (_You know it must be deliberate; Itachi has been in control of his body's actions since his early youth_.)

The taps send her to twitching, biting her lip to keep from saying anything more. She wonders if he odes it to frighten her or to make her more paranoid than she already is.

"So ill...It's hard to believe you would survive your injuries," he says quietly. "I know that it is not Sasuke that saved you, that is for certain."

"You did not kill me," she says, breath caught in her throat as she inhales, "and so I did not die."

Itachi looks as if he finds this incredibly amusing, at least for him, and she sees this in the slightest twitch of his lips, trying to hide a smile with a sneer. If he disagrees, he says nothing and Mikoto flounders in her confusion.

She wonders if he intends to fix his mistake.

"So will you kill me now?" she asks again, focusing on slowing her heartbeat and breathing. It doesn't work very well, because instead of calm, she feels light headed and ill again. Itachi must notice, because she feels one of his hands come to rest on the paper thin skin of her shoulder, pushing her deeper into the pillows.

She resists as best she can, clawing fingers into her foam mattress and steel bed frame. This must anger Itachi, because he pushes against her harder, not one to be told no under any circumstances. (He will walk all over you, and you will let him because that is simply how it has always been.) In her weakness, Mikoto has to let go, arms quivering and burning with use.

The one thing about him that surprises her is that he is warm, unnaturally warm when pressed into her chest, tracing the contours of her face with a sharp gaze that cuts, and his hands, much larger than her own now, are wide and furnace-like against her arms. What she doesn't understand is why he looks at her at all, though she'd like to think it is because he sees an image that is mother, and that is it not the same as what he sees now.

She doesn't know what he is looking for in her face, but she does not think he will find it.

He spares a glance behind him into the hallway, where one other stands against the doorway, not quite walking through as though afraid to interrupt something. Itachi appears to like it this way, gesturing for the figure to go away. Mikoto thinks that he will likely join up with the other shortly

"Go to sleep, haha-ue."

She'd like to tell him no, but the Sharingan puts her into a fitful sleep before she can protest. She goes to sleep with the thought that she will not wake again (_and this is what you want to hear, so you tell it to yourself over and over again_.)

- - - - -

Strangely, she does wake, and when she does, it is already late morning with no traces of nighttime terrors. There is no more bloody syringe, her bedclothes are crisp and neat, and her thigh is bandaged tightly with gauze and strips of white that look like mummification wrapping against her yellow, blue, and white from bruising skin. It is much more quickly done, uncomfortably drawn together, and Mikoto knows without a doubt that a nurse would never do it in such an efficient but casual way.

The window, usually open, is closed tightly while her clock glares at her with red numbers and letters, painfully reminding her of the passage of time. The sky must be overcast, because in the blue-grey light of the room, she can see and feel the chill coming off the windows.

When the nurse comes in during rounds at midday, Mikoto is unable to explain why she is so deeply unhappy other than that she is disappointed. (_You can't tell them because they wouldn't understand, they would think you are crazy, and while you are many things, you are certainly not _that.)

"I would prefer to move," she says, looking toward the window and feigning melancholy. What she really wants is the comfort of hiding, running away like she couldn't do before by herself. "I've been in here a long time and I need a new view."

The nurse looks at her thoughtfully, as if uncertain of Mikoto's sincerity. "We'll see," she says, pulling a few fuzzy spots from the elbows of her cardigan. "You've still got to go through your physical before they can change your ward."

"Where would I go if I did?" she asks.

"Women's ward, second floor, or at least that's what I would guess. You'd have a lot of company, that's for sure." The nurse smiles, ruffling Mikoto's unruly black hair, muttering something about it's softness with her deep, pleasant voice. "Since you're a special case, you can't check out of the hospital completely until you get approval from the Hokage."

"Ah,"Mikoto says, nodding as though this were somehow significant. She knows vaguely that she will never be let out, because releasing her would be giving meaning to the clan of Uchiha again, and from what snippets of conversation she catches from the nurses, she knows that this is something that must never happen to Konoha again. (_You're dead, remember? That is what they have built up so that your sons will not come back to them before being made useless_.)

She wants to have meaning again, and her would-be-murderer won't even give her that in killing her. Mikoto has come to recognize that she's too insignificant to bother with.

- - - - -

"You're really still very lovely," says Kirie, tucking a piece of bleached hair behind into her mouth. Mikoto has seen that since her last visit, the young nurse has changed her look to match the environment; sterile, cheap, and very plastic. "Once you start eating again, your hair will grow back and you'll fill out on the sides."

Mikoto looks down to her hips, at the boniness of them and how they are not at all like a part of the body that she had before this time. As a mother, she had never been very full figured and it had proven to be a problem for her pregnancies, but at the same time she had never been bird thin, breakable by touch alone. (_Your arms are still yellowing with bruises where Itachi pushed you too hard, but thankfully, no one mentions where they come from at first; you look as if you have bruised yourself_.)

"I'm too thin," she says, subconsciously echoing words she has only heard days before.

Kirie looks at her, smiling kindly, and pats her on the shoulder. "That's to be expected. You haven't eaten anything solid in a long time. We'll get that tube taken out just as soon as I see that you're healthy enough to do it." She turns for a moment, picking up a dry washcloth. "You're ready for a proper bath, right? As long as you don't stand, it should be fine, so how about we take care of that?" She tucks another stray piece of hair behind her ear.

At the idea of seeing her own body after years of not looking, Mikoto tightens her lips together, rubbing at the bone of her wrists and worrying her finger joints. She isn't so sure she ever wants to see her body ever again, not when it has betrayed her so many times. (_It is as your son would have you think, that you can't even die properly_.)

The wheelchair that she is pulled into is not something that she thinks of favorably, not after a life of seeing any sort of help from machines as weakness. The look of it alone reminds her of the fragile women from the maternity ward from long ago (_not that_ you_ ever were one_), how they all were afraid to move and disrupt something, _anything._ The feel of oil for the metal joints comes across her fingers and spreads cross her hands, wet and unpleasant. The chair squeaks under her weight when she settles into it, Kirie fussing with her legs and arms. (_You grudge her this, because there's nothing you want more than to fall out and crawl away_.) With her feet placed firmly on the foot rests, toes curled into her feet, she feels like a broken thing, old beyond her years.

She would feel much better if her hair would grey and fade into the polished walls. As she is now, she is an ink stain, a name out of place that cannot be removed very easily.

They'll simply have to cut me out, she thinks, feeling the wheels move beneath her.

- - - - -

The water is lukewarm before she ever manages to get into a bathtub. She is somewhat glad for this because she does not know if hot water (_scalding, how you like it_) would make her feel very good right now. Kirie is sitting next to her, reading from a trashy romance novel, sighing tragically every few moments as she imagines the heroine in the book might. No matter how mature a job it is, Mikoto is quite certain that the young nurse is still filled with youthful childishness and whimsy.

Her hair is slicked back and short, something that she feels more acutely now that it itches against the backs of her ears. Mikoto chooses to sink neck deep into the water, just enough to make her hair float away, and stare at the ceiling. It is vaulted, white, and empty with its bright lights flickering just the slightest bit, and if Mikoto stares long enough, she thinks she can see something of a sky beyond it.

It is this she looks at because beneath and beside her are her body, a useless thing that will not even lift her out of the bathtub by herself. She is trapped in a tender body that is marked with the efforts of trying to press her thumbs up against the rim of the tub, adjusting her angle. She sucks the tip of one thumb, wincing at the pain it causes.

The truth is that now that she has seen her body, she wants nothing to do with this gangly, scar covered form that she is housed in. There are things written there in tissue and freckles that she doesn't want to acknowledge because of the memories that go along with them. There are stories, and she knows that most of their supporting characters are now dead.

One hook shaped scar that lies just at the base of her ankle is caused accidentally while training as a genin. A wire trap had caught her by the foot and ripped though her shoe, grabbing for her skin before her instructor could untangle her. The whiteness on the back of her leg is from a burn in the kitchen when she was married, caused by carelessness. She does not (_and have no reason to_) close ovens while turned around anymore, especially while holding an infant Sasuke in her arms. She had screamed that time, causing Itachi and Fugaku to run into the kitchen with kunai in hand. It had been hard to take seriously since the two had identical expressions written across their faces.

But more important that those are two other scars, both long and shiny on her stomach. One she knows is from when they had to forcibly remove Sasuke from her body, cutting her open during her darkest hours of birthing. She had been horrified at the thought, but both her men had stood beside her, still not far enough along to leave her to her own devices.

The second, an ugly scar that starts from the bottom of her left breast and extends to her right hip, she does not remember getting in the same way as the others. The only thing that she does recall is the glint of a katana blade and a sudden pain, agonizing and melancholy with betrayal. They had bought Itachi that katana, she and Fugaku that is, for his twelfth birthday. He had said thank you as politely as ever, polished it regularly, and unsheathed it against the womb that had bore him.

It is that which hurts her more than any memory of her abdomen being opened and shining wet with her blood.

"You'll never be able to have children, even by artificial means now," said the doctor only days before. "This scar has made it quite certain, but I suppose it's fortunate it happened how it did." He looks at her, looking very regretful and old. "I don't think you were going after anymore children anyway."

"No," she had said, thinking of one of the last arguments she had ever had with her husband. (_"You're not healthy enough, Mikoto, so let's just be satisfied with what we've been given."_) She had said it a bit too loudly as well. She wanted to be sure that she could be heard over the sound of her childhood dream falling apart.

At that thought, she is suddenly very awake, feeling eyes on her hand that is trailing over this new mar on her belly, the mark of her body's barrenness. It takes a fair amount of work, but she still is able to draw her legs a little towards her chest.

Awareness tingles over her when the water suddenly feels cold. It has been for a while, but she has ignored it. Now it feels icy. With one hand to her newest and largest scar, she lifts her head as best she can, ignoring Kirie's questioning glance.

From the mirror in the corner, she is positive that she can see her eldest son, but says nothing when she glances back to Kirie, heart palpitating against her lungs, making it difficult to say much of anything. When she looks back again, she sees nothing.

She traces the long diagonal wound.

- - - - -

To Be Continued

- - - - -

A/N: More back story in this one, which is actually my favorite part. I'll probably do a fic focused on Fugaku in the near future since I kinda feel bad for how much we all love to slap him around.

Fan soundtrack is a definite because this collection of music is entirely too awesome to be left alone. I'm going to credit this chapter song as "Your Hand In Mine" by Explosions In The Sky.

Your feedback has been wonderful! It is always encouraged, and I will try as best as I can to get back to all of you who leave the option there. It's very relieving to know that anyone is reading this.


	4. Turned Away With Autumn Weather

Title: These Are All Warnings That You Will Likely Forget (4 of ?)

Author: tsubaki-hana

Series: Naruto

Rating: M

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Kishimoto Masashi.

Summary: She could feel the blade of his katana more easily than the palm of his hand on her face. (Eight years after the Uchiha massacre, Mikoto wakes up. Itachi/Mikoto, Uchihacest.)

- - - - -

Warnings: Still apply.

- - - - -

- - - - -

Itachi is her first (_living_) child, and at first, she cannot be parted with him, from the moment he is born to the first time she is allowed to hold him, steadying his soft neck with the crook of her arm. It is as if he is made to fit her perfectly, a piece of herself carved away from her living flesh and given breath. (_You have dreamed of him, imagining his ten perfect toes and ten little fingers that would grab at your hand until you have romanticized yourself bearing a godly child, something that you are positive that you will never have_.)

They hand him to her, the arms of her husband and the call-in doctor, asking her questions about how she feels. But she does not see them. All that she sees is the small bundle against her breast with the shock of black hair and creased open eyes, dark blue in his infancy.

"I have never dealt with a quieter child," says one of the midwives, rubbing at her calf and giving her a once over, just to be sure. Mikoto does not mind the middle-aged hands against her, not when she is so tired and glowing with happiness. "He seems perfectly healthy, so maybe he'll just be as collected as his father was."

This makes Mikoto wrinkle her nose, but she keeps on stroking the black down of her baby's head. "I think he will be unlike any of us, but I am glad for it," she says, feeling the dull pull of pain in her abdomen where she knows that she is likely still bleeding. (_You suppose it might matter if you are, but give no second thought to it. After all, it is the selfsame pain that created what you hold now, and at this point in your life, you are more grateful for this wound than for all the stars in the sky_.)

In her arms, he is very warm, and she is content with that.

"What a beautiful baby," her mother says, stroking his soft face. "Such dark hair and eyes . . . It would not be very hard to imagine that he will look like you, daughter." To this, her mother, already an old woman with her fair share of wrinkles and waxen skin, looks at Fugaku beseechingly, as though expecting him to have something to say about it. "How do you feel about that, son? What will you think of a son that looks like your wife?"

Her husband is quiet, muttering to himself and shifting uncomfortably in the room filled with women. "I am sure that it will not matter what he looks like so long as he is respectable. All things considered, I would not like to make any expectations for my son that is not even an hour old." He looks awkwardly to Mikoto, and she ignores it in favor of adjusting her son on her shoulder. "There are a lot of things that could happen between now and then."

She knows that this is an insult disguised as a simple comment. Fugaku always seems to be waiting for things to go wrong, at least where she is involved. (_You think he might see through your lovely housewife facade, see though your pliant lover's skin, and know that you do not want him so much as you want what is in your arms right now. No matter how much you try to change things, this will always be so. It's just embarrassing to know that he knows as well_.)

"Let's wait a little while," she says, meeting his eyes awkwardly (_like your first kiss, because neither of you closed your eyes, but instead watched one another, waiting to see when you would mess up._)

When everyone is gone, conditions improve, or at least they do in her eyes because Fugaku is no longer so stiff and formal, but instead tranquil and transfixed on their new son, daring to hold him for the second time that day.

"I am especially skilled at handling weapons, but children are a whole new realm for me," he says sounding as irritable as he looks, but she sees the softness in his eyes that lays beneath. He doesn't know that there might not be much of a difference between children and blades, since both can cut both ways. Both Fugaku and Mikoto are really too young to be having children just yet, but she doesn't know how to reconcile that other than to cope with what they have. (_You are seventeen the year that is Itachi is born, five years out of the ninja academy, four years since achieving chuunin level and one and a half years since achieving jounin level. Your life has been laid out for you, and you are hardly a quarter of a way through with your life at the time. You will not know until much later that it should have been shorter_.)

"Don't worry about it," she says, feeling the absence of Itachi in her arms and hips, but not daring to take him from her husband. There is a deep, hidden pride that she feels in the reverberations of his voice, sending a foreign warmth through her every time she hears his excitement. "You are doing well already, so there's nothing to suggest you'd do it wrong."

"Learn as you go, is it?" he asks wryly.

"I suppose," she says.

(_It's a shame that neither of you can learn fast enough_.)

That night, when it is just she and Itachi in the stillness of the bedroom, she is content and complete, the way that she feels she hasn't been for many years, not since she wore bells in her hair and felt the emptiness of having nothing that is a living part of herself. Together, wrapped in the new futon and comfortably settled, Mikoto cries for the first time after a long dry spell. She has not felt this happy in the entirety of her life.

She likes the closeness of her baby when she draws him to rest in the crook of her neck, especially since she cannot attain the wholeness of pregnancy now that he has been birthed. Mikoto covers his little head with a small but dark silk scarf and steadies her heart beats. She knows that this is the closest she will ever get to what they had before.

He blinks sleepily into her shoulder, still too young to have the long eyelashes that will come later, something she is certain of. She shudders from ticklishness, but loves the feeling of it.

"Ne, Itachi-san is sleepy," she says quietly, rubbing his back tenderly. "So is your 'kaa-san, but I want to be awake when you are awake. To make sure I don't miss anything," she adds, as though that were somehow important. (_But the truth is that you missed a lot, isn't it? There's a million things that you did not see even when looking straight at them, things that perhaps you should have seen if you were such a wonderful mother_.)

He fusses a little bit, burying himself deeper into the veil of her hair. His tiny fingers wrap eagerly at the loose locks and pull before he finally settles again into a light sleep, his breath from his mouth warm and moist against her shoulder.

I will not miss anything, she vows to herself, because this is what I wanted and I want to enjoy it while it lasts. While he lasts.

(_It's so much worse to know that you not only failed as a mother and as a person, but that it is he that took that joy from you as though you didn't matter at all._)

- - - - -

4

After such snow, there is nothing indeed; the ins

and outs of centuries, pestered heather.

That's what coming full circle means-

When your countenance begins to resemble weather,

when Pygmalion's vanished and you are free.

-Joseph Brodsky

- - - - -

It is some time before Tsunade ever hears of her apparent recovery, and she is not sure if this is because of some intentional negligence or a simple backup of paperwork. She prefers to think the latter, but there is no saying, not now that things are more complicated than before. There is something startlingly normal about paperwork, and it is this normalcy that Mikoto clings to and strives to find again in her routine.

Routine is exactly what has formed now, and she can put a timer to the span of time between the first morning checks and the time that she will be given a pitiful lunch of vegetable broth and rice porridge, the only thing she can eat now that she has no feeding tube. She will then go to physical therapy where she is reminded that she is just barely strong enough to bend a paperclip. There will be no medication afterwards. Mikoto is considered dependent on it. She's all right with that, because if nothing else, at least she is beginning to live in a way that is relatively stable.

"It's only been a few weeks, so you should be proud of how far you're getting. I'll put in your change of ward papers soon, so we can get you back to your life," says her doctor, pressing the bridge of his nose between his fingers, but still smiling. He has been under a heavy workload, and Mikoto has made it a point to be as unnoticeable as possible, just the way things are meant to be.

"And the Hokage?" she asks quietly, looking through partially opened eyes, watching her eyelashes weave into each other.

"She's been busy, but we'll get a meeting scheduled as soon as possible. She'll have to come out here since you're still not good to travel long distances." To this, he adds a note on his clipboard, as though to remind himself of what he says for later on. She'd like to think that he is making a note on Tsunade, but it is more likely that it is to remind the orderlies to stop moving her across the hospital so much.

So she waits, she waits until it has been a full month since she has woken, three weeks after seeing Itachi and two weeks after hearing that she is barren. She swallows this with a bit of the honeyed tea that Kirie seems to think makes her feel better, but it only reminds her of rainy days on the back porch with her father, back when she didn't feel so very old. (_You're not old, or so you keep trying to tell yourself, even if you feel for all intents and purposes like all you have are those old memories that feel miles away but on the tip of your tongue._)

"I think I should not like to have any tea today," she says, drawing her lean hands together into a loose clasp, looking for all the world like the bones of some forgotten wings. They look ancient next to Kirie's own warm and soft hands, still not aged by the blood and wasted lives that will run by her in the coming years.

"But you seemed to like it so much!"says Kirie, taking a sip of her own over sweetened tea. "And besides that, it's really good for you!"

She says nothing, but takes a slow sip, trying to hold her breath. She doesn't want to taste it. If she tastes or smells it, she will associate it to wet planks and the wind-blown pampas grass of a small house at the wood's edge, the only good thing that remains of her father in her mind.

When she is free, she decides, she will not do anything that she does not want. Mikoto will relive her memories when she wants to and have daisy and primrose children that will always come back in the spring and look gloriously bright in a cool shower of water, yellow and red and pink (_like an open wound_) like little jewels scattered on the lawn. There will be no tea at mid afternoon, but open book reading instead, with a side of salted plum candies that she will keep in the bell jar that she used to keep behind the dresser, the one in her bedroom in the Uchiha house.

"I will keep Darjeeling instead of macha in my house when I am gone," she says abstractly to the corners of the room. Kirie thinks that Mikoto must be talking to her, because she smiles indulgently, swigging her tea in a very improper fashion.

"Richness of flavor instead of bitterness, eh? Serving it like the strange westerners from outside the shinobi nations?" Kirie taps one manicured nail against her lips. "I think I like that better. My mother would hate me if I did, the stubborn old crone, but I don't care. You can serve it with sweet cream and toasted bread."

"And I will always smile and be polite, even when there is something I would rather not discuss. I will become a face of happiness, and none will know anything about me." (_So they can't hurt you, so they can't tell you what to be, and so they can't tell you that you are a failure_.) "Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? Too bad things don't work that way."

Kirie looks crestfallen, twirling a simple silver band around her finger. "Well, we can always try, right? I mean, neither of us are really old, and there's a lot of time for us to try and get our own little houses with perfect garden beds and wooden fences. Who says we won't?"

To be s full of hope again, she thinks, would be something I would gladly die for. She knows that no matter what common sense tells her, she _doesn't_ have the mobility of the young woman before her, and she also knows that she would give anything to be guileless and guiltless. Her son has made certain that she will never be able to live with what she has, much less what she wants.

Against her own intuition, she hopes anyway. (_Building yourself up and knocking yourself down are things that you are good at. You've been doing it since your first days as a genin and your first days as a wife, and again when your first days as a mother pass you by. You know you'll never learn, since you've never been rational like Fugaku or Itachi. You are a fool, and you will happily build your tower and watch when someone comes to destroy it with no protest._)

She smiles bitterly against the rim of her cup, and wishes Tsunade would catch up with her office work.

- - - - -

"It's been a long time, Mikoto-san."

In the growing twilight, she looks to the doorway fast enough to make her short hair slap against her cheeks and sting. Beyond the veil of inkwell black hair, she can see the silhouette of a woman in the doorway, leaning heavily on the doorframe as though too heavy to support herself.

She recognizes the blonde hair and busty figure quickly, though her rationale tells her that Tsunade would have to be at least fifty years old and not at all as ageless as the woman she sees now. She also knows that Tsunade has always liked to wear the wrong-shaped skin, as though a few years off or a few years on will make things better. Tsunade is another woman that is trapped in a body that does not look the way she feels, and because of that, Mikoto thinks she might be able to like the new Hokage.

"Yes," she says, not quite looking the woman in the face, "it has been at least a decade since I saw you for myself. How are you doing, Tsunade?" asks Mikoto, sitting up as best as she can. She is still respectful enough to show proper appreciation for the Hokage, even when she is not technically and ninja any longer.

Tsunade, smiling thinly, gives a scoffing noise before stepping further into the room, her high heeled shoes clacking ominously against the linoleum. Even from where she is, Mikoto can see the dents it leaves from her weight. There is also a folder under her arm, which she shifts repetitively as though uncomfortable with it. The Godaime does not strike her as the office type, and Mikoto feels it within herself to be able to feel sorry for her.

"As good as it gets, I suppose," the blonde grumbles, sitting herself down in one of the uncomfortable chairs. "Getting old was not something I was expecting to happen. But I haven't been sleeping eight years, so I suppose I should have seen it coming." Mikoto laughs at this, not because it is funny but because it is true. "Of more concern, how are you, Mikoto-san? It's not every day that you wake from a sleeping death."

Mikoto smiles wanly, methodically tearing threads out of her sheets, leaving little criss-cross lines to pattern it. "As well as can be expected. I...really wasn't prepared to be alive, much less be awake. It's hard to come to terms with."

"You aren't."

Her smile drops, eyes wide and aware. "I'm not what, Tsunade-sama?"

"You aren't coping," says Tsunade, frowning and scribbling on one of her papers much like the doctor had done only a day before. She says it so smartly, so confidently, that Mikoto doesn't quite have it in herself to deny it. "Everything that Kirie-chan and your doctor told me makes me think that you are not dealing well with this, whatever 'this' exactly is." Tsunade's pen taps against the side table, aggravatingly loud in the hum of the florescent lights, dimly glowing in the room against the sunlight that bleeds through, an angry raw orange.

"What were you expecting?" she asks, turning to look at the sunset. "It's not like I have anything to be here for. I'm supposed to be a name in that list of casualties, and the only thing wrong with that is that my body wouldn't die."

Tsunade, looking directly at her with sharp amber eyes, flicks a piece of paper over, breathing a little more quickly. "Shut up," she says, pushing blonde hair behind her and pulling at the hem of her green haori, a nervous habit that Mikoto is prone to as well. "You've got a lot to be grateful for. You've been presented with an opportunity that the others before you didn't have, and if you waste it, you're a fool."

Mikoto knows about Dan and her little brother, has always known why Tsunade took to herself and refused to be a part of the ninja lifestyle after their deaths. She remembers all the people saying that Tsunade should have been stronger, should have tried to make those sacrifices worth something. Mikoto also remembers disagreeing, because who were they to tell how a woman should deal with her grief? They do not feel the same way, so why was it their place to correct the (_still_) young woman?

"It's not the same as you," she says, swallowing something that could have been tears but becomes dryness, a wasteland beneath her eyes. "It's not the same when your family dies in combat as when they are murdered. There is choice and reconciliation there." Mikoto grips tightly around one string, feeling it under her throbbing fingers. "My parents weren't ninja. They didn't choose to die in combat."

(_That isn't what you mean at all, it's not even the same reason, but you will not tell this woman that, because that disservice to your house and wholeness is personal, an affront to your person that cannot be staved off with weapons._)

Tsunade blinks long and steady, her pen ceasing its constant motion. Both sit quietly, cold despite the warm colors of the room.

"It doesn't change the fact that they're dead," says Tsunade. It is blunt and brutal, and Mikoto does not want to think about that. "It's exactly the same in the respect that they will never come back, no matter what promises people will make you."

Mikoto lets a shuddering breath out, and feels the rattling of her heart against her dried bones. (_It will never get back to the way it was, redder and brighter like the painting's that made the romance in your eyes come alive. Your eyes used to show everything, but now they are dull like burned charcoal, desolate and craggy with hollows made by flame._) She sees the kitchen table of her home, set and ready fro breakfast and all three of her boys sitting there, with Sasuke throwing enthusiastic comments and request for lunch in her direction and Itachi frowning at his rice porridge (_which he has never liked, no matter what efforts you made to help. He always ate it drowning in sesame oil and soy_.) There's nothing out of place in her mind's eye, except the knowledge that Fugaku isn't alive any more makes the green of his shirt seem muted, refusing him from the scene. Her parents down the street would have been sitting in their living room, reading the paper or dutifully fixing a tool belt to be sold later that day.

The fact of the matter is that this scene will never recur in her life, and it is this more than anything that makes her eyes hurt and her chest empty itself of all signs of life. It is not pain like a wound that she feels, but instead an awareness of the chasm spread out before her and the pull of it on her stomach. The pulling is agonizing in it's own way, filling her body with heavy grief.

"Does it ever stop hurting?" she asks, rasping in her desert sorrow.

"No," says Tsunade, a mirror of Mikoto's own face. She does not mind this, because if there is any one person that she feels might feel the same, it is the aging Hokage. Tsunade is a portrait of bitterness and regret, and she wonders why it suits the shape of this woman's face so well. "But you don't feel it as often when you allow other people to keep your mind off of it."

"I don't want to forget them. I don't want to forget _anything._"

Tsunade looks at her with her emotions worn on her sleeve.

"You don't."

Mikoto almost cries, but covers it up with a sharp bark of laughter, finding this all very unfair at her expense but at the same time finding it very humorous. "Fate sure does like to spit in our eyes, doesn't it?" She feels her lips curl tightly up, and one of her own shaking hands runs through her chopped hair, wanting to run it through what she can still feel as thick, dark locks that stuck to her neck when she worked out in her small garden. Itachi used to pull it when he was an infant whereas Sasuke would chew on it. "Then I guess that's what we are, two old ladies who woke up one morning to find out that they weren't young anymore. I suppose that next we'll be talking about the good old days."

Tsunade smiles in earnest, a real one that reaches her frigid brown eyes."I won't tell if you don't."

- - - - -

While she hates to do it, it is agreed that she will stay in the hospital, at least until it could be made certain that she could move herself around adequately. Her health is still poor enough to merit medical attention, and as a medic, herself, Tsunade is firm in her diagnosis.

"Just because you're breathing doesn't mean that you're healthy. While we should be thankful that you function normally as a human being," she pauses, when Mikoto coughs uncomfortably, "it also stands to reason that you wouldn't have the means to defend yourself if someone were to intrude on your home. I know your feelings on being treated like an invalid, but at least here they'll be able to help you get through your therapy and give you some company."

There is more scratching from the clipboard where Tsunade makes her own notes next to the doctor's. Mikoto grows to hate the sound, since it always seems to be about things about her that are out of her control, as though she could be fixed if they simply find a pattern in her behavior. She shifts irritably, letting Tsunade know of her impatience.

Tsunade stops, and levels her with a glare. "It's not healthy for you to refuse company. You need to see people on occasion. It's not as if you've had a lot of it recently."

Mikoto thinks of Itachi and tries not to frown. She thinks it might not work, because Tsunade gives her a look that sets Mikoto's nerves on edge, the glacial eyes meeting hers with suspicion. However, the Hokage doesn't call her on it, and continues writing her notes, perhaps a little more quickly than before.

"Kirie mentioned the women's ward," she says, trying to draw attention away from her slip. "How long do you think it would take until I got to be there?"

"A month or so, depending on whether or not you have chakra driven therapy. Once you can walk, or at least stand with a cane or walker, I'll sign your change of ward forms. Until then," Tsunade looks at her, hawkish, "I expect you to sit tight, read a few good books, and write to me on a regular basis. I'm not going to let you just mope or hurt yourself trying to speed things along. I have another patient like that, and it's a wonder that the boy is still alive." Mikoto smiles at the irritable face that the older woman makes, but Tsunade snorts and chews her pen tip. "More aggravation than I am paid to deal with."

Tsunade, she thinks, would have likely been a wonderful mother, tending to patients like a very busy mother hen, not sure which one to work on first. She remembers what it felt like to be that way, rushing around cuts and bruises in a rush, trying to alleviate pain as quickly as she can. Children's faces, she had decided, were far more beautiful when pink with laughter, not tears.

Sasuke was always in trouble or injuring himself, whether it was stumbling when he was learning to walk or mishandling his shuriken. She had cooed her apologies over many small wounds, kissing tears off of cheeks.

With Itachi, injury had been rare, something that was viewed as a disappointment to Fugaku as a first-time father with high expectations. Mikoto, having none, always drew her squirming son into her arms and put his head between her throat and chin, singing the red dragonfly rhyme he seemed fond of. It had only happened three or four times, and even then, Itachi had been incredibly young, only four years old.

Watching Tsunade fret over children that aren't even her own, Mikoto feels very empty.

- - - - -

To Be Continued

- - - - -

A/N: I spoil you all with quick updates.

I promise, Itachi will be back in his full-grown glory very soon. I'm working on Mikoto's character right now since it's going to be important later on. I can't build up an incestual relationship on nothing but sex, considering sex seems to have little to no appeal to Itachi and Mikoto probably has some discretions about familial relationships.

It's not going to be a short story, probably several chapters longer than "This Place Is a Prison" since Mikoto is such a fresh character that doesn't have a fiction community riddled with overused plots and cliches. I want to do this right, which means I'll probably take a long time to getting to the full on pairing.

Your reviews are always warmly welcomed. I'm sorry I didn't take the time to respond on an individual basis to the ff net community, but this time around I'll be sure to do it.


	5. Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair

Title: These Are All Warnings That You Will Likely Forget (5 of ?)

Author: tsubaki-hana

Series: Naruto

Rating: M

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Kishimoto Masashi.

Summary: She could feel the blade of his katana more easily than the palm of his hand on her face. (Eight years after the Uchiha massacre, Mikoto wakes up. Itachi/Mikoto, Uchihacest.)

- - - - -

Warnings: Still apply.

- - - - -

- - - - -

She wore her hair long for many years, as long as she could grow it because what was more beautiful than a woman with a veil of charcoal black hair, as shifting and changing as the water in the river just down the lane? She tied ribbons and lace and bells, anything to make it brighter and more noticeable. She had something that was solely hers, something that made her stand out from the other girls (_for that certainly wasn't your ninja skills, because those are just average, even for a jounin_).

The day Mikoto cuts her hair, she does not pay attention to the act so much as the feeling of the weight coming off of her shoulders, the sudden coldness that she can feel on her back where there might have once been a long rope of hair. The scissors hiss their blades together, and despite her desire to cut her body free from her inky black hair, she recoils from the sound.

In her arms, Itachi, just under a year old, holds the long pieces of her hair in his fisted hand, unusually long, spider-leg eyelashes wet from a short cry he had earlier.

It is that sound, more than the scissors, that makes Mikoto crawl into some corner and hug her arms to her, filling something that is strangely vacant and noticeable in the vibrations of her son's crying. It is painful, and she finds herself cutting her hair more quickly, trying to cover up the sound.

It is evening when Fugaku gets back, and her husband looks at her curiously while she swings the remnant of her hair back and forth in her right hand, eyes trailing after it forlornly. She does not seem very aware of the baby in her arms, but she does tighten her grip every so often, as though afraid he were somehow going to slip away.

It is very quiet, and that is what she wants.

"Is there a reason you decided to cut your hair?" he asks stiffly, walking over to her side with quietly creaking feet, his weight pressing into her space.

"No," she says, feeling the salt that stings in the corner of her eyes. He frowns at her, but she only smiles shakily, adjusting her baby in her arms with ease.

"Why did you cut it if you were just going to regret it?" he asks her, taking a quiet infant Itachi from her arms, prying with warm fingers. She does not miss the quick worrisome look that passes over his eyes. Instead of saying something about it, she swallows around her thick dry tongue, trying to figure out why she feels like crying.

"I don't know."

"Are you sick?" He doesn't mean anything harsh by it, she knows, but it sounds so brutal all the same. Fugaku has never been very good at subtlety, and even two years into their marriage, Mikoto is still slightly upset by the bluntness of her husband.

"I didn't think so," she says miserably, "but I could be wrong."

(_By which you mean to say that you **are** wrong, but are too stubborn to say it aloud. You don't want to be the sick one, the weak wife, the mentally disturbed woman that counts dresser drawers and kimono boxes that always add up one too many._)

Healthy people don't do things like this, she thinks to herself, and it seems worse since she doesn't know why she did it at all. She's not certain that she wants to know at all. What she doesn't know can't hurt her.

He doesn't say anything else, but hands Itachi off to his visiting mother with passing ease. Itachi protests only the smallest amount, holding onto the flak jacket with small but strong pale fingers. She watches him pass into the hallway, feeling the tug of something inside the cavity of her chest (_empty, you add, because what ought to be there is passing down the corridor in the arms of your mother-in-law and away from you_).

"You didn't tell me that your mother was coming," she says, trying to straighten herself out, brushing loose hair from her cream colored apron. The strands stick out like cracks in the white stone of the Nakano Temple, somewhere that she's been recently and secretly, because no one believes her well enough to wander where she pleases. There are no priests anymore, so it is considered 'dangerous' for her to go alone with her baby.

"I would have made dinner earlier had I known that," she adds, thinking that the comment is somehow important to her husband.

Fugaku sighs, looking more tired than he usually does. He has been working all day, yet he always seems to be more put together than Mikoto, and she envies that. She wonders why she can't be as perfect as he is with his even cut hair and starched (_by you_) clothes. It seems inherently unfair that he is doing so much better than she is.

Self-consciously, she reaches up and feels the rough edges of her hair.

"I didn't tell you because I wanted you to rest," he says, sitting down next to her and bringing the scissors into his own hand, checking their sharpness with the pad of his thumb. The blade leaves a thin white line, but does not break the skin, which Fugaku seems pleased with somehow. (_Which is silly, you think to yourself, because you're in no hurry to hurt yourself. You're in a hurry to figure out what it is about yourself that displeases you so suddenly, as though the sudden absence of the child in your womb has transformed you into someone else._) "You've been running around a lot lately, and I know that you don't sleep, not when you know that Itachi is awake."

"I want to be there when he needs me," she says, and this ought to solve the problem but it doesn't. Fugaku just looks at her, his gaze long and hard. "I know that he's sleeping through the night by himself now, but he's been fussy the last couple of days and..."

"Itachi is never troublesome, not unless he is hungry," says Fugaku. "Try again."

She doesn't try again, because she knows that she has no answers, no realistic excuses that she could push off on her husband. (_And what good is lying when you are so poor at it? He always sees through your stories, so why bother trying at all if ever?_) Instead, she grabs the tips of her hair and says, "I didn't do a very good job, did I?"

"No," says Fugaku, a wry smile cracking the corner of his mouth. "You look terrible like that."

She smiles hesitantly, and even though she knows it is in jest that he says it, she still feels a hand of her own crawling around her neck, scratching and measuring the poorly done hack-job on her hair. The fingers shake just a little bit, but Fugaku grabs them with his own, settling her hands into her lap comfortably and measuring for himself with his own rough hands.

"Trying to saw your head off?" he asks, probably thinking he has made a clever joke. "I didn't know that things had been that unpleasant. Maybe if you just slept more..."

She doesn't listen, instead choosing to ramble on about what she has planned for dinner, and that she certainly hoped that his mother would like that, and really, how was his day at work? She goes on like this for a while, and Fugaku answers her meaningless questions patiently, grabbing up the scissors as his own. The snipping sound makes her stumble over her description of one of Itachi's walking ventures down the hall, the one that made him fall and knock his head against the low table of the kitchen (_the one that set him to crying and her into a madness_).

He pretends not to notice and goes on trimming Mikoto's hair to make a perfect line across the base of her neck, an itchy one that she isn't able to ignore whenever it brushes up against the collar of her shirt. She winces with each snip of the scissors, wondering if he will simply cut it all off and save her the trouble later on.

She knows that if it's not gone today, it will probably be gone tomorrow, and she's not sure if she'll be able to not-explain to her husband why there's a pile of dead hair on the floor.

Looking beneath her knees, it seems strangely fitting where the hair falls on her mopped floor, weaving into the whorls and knots of the woodgrain, like stretched little macabre fingers. (_You should struggle harder before your pulled down._)

- - - - -

5

The doctor came in the morning,

she held my hand,

and asked "Was it worth it?"

"Could it be worse than this?"

-The Knife

- - - - -

Mikoto's first day of physical therapy is spent doing little else other than squeezing a small rubber ball, an obnoxiously blue one, just like everything else around here. Her brittle fingers are white against the florescent plastic, and she watches as the knuckles of her right hand strain, and every fiber in her arm clenches. (_Your tendons don't move as they should because you have crooked little fingers, and the band of white that you have cut apart in unnumerable men and women shifts awkwardly over the bones and muscle. It _stretches_, as it hasn't done in years._)

She feels silly, working so hard to move five fingers, forehead slick with sweat from her work. Not so long ago, she could have broken the rubber in her grip, but now it slowly bends and moves back into its shape, as though she weren't working at all.

"It gets better, Mikoto-san," says Kirie, sitting next to her in the cold plastic of her chair. "It really does, just as soon as we start the chakra therapy. But until then, you need to repair your chakra paths yourself."

"Well, a whole lot of good its going to do me if I break my hand trying to get ready," she grumbles, angry at the way the sweat makes her forehead slick and itchy from unevenly cut hair. She doesn't bother to brush it away. She's already too tired to lift her arm to do something so simple.

"You try too hard," says Kirie, brushing the hair away for her, her hand cool and smooth. A link of her bracelet catches on Mikoto's hair, but she does not grimace, instead watching as the steel ring pulls through the black strands. The glint of it is bright and wicked in her eyes. "There's only so much you can do when you first start. By all accounts, you're doing very well!"says Kirie, smiling widely. But Mikoto's eyes are not caught on the bracelet anymore, nor on the cheap pink lip gloss that she can smell as wax and strawberry from where she lays. Instead, her focus rests on the ball in her hand, her mouth curled into a bitter smile.

"I could have popped this ball eight years ago. I could have snapped it clear in half," says Mikoto, frowning disconsolately at the blue rubber. "What is so different? Why doesn't it work as it should?"

Kirie moves to say something, one petite hand against the brittle bone of her wrist, and seeing this, Mikoto feels like a corpse.

She ought to have died, and this she knows by the iv in her arm and the scars across her neck. They are deadly wounds, one that would kill a stronger man, and she knows that Itachi was right to be shocked by her survival. She could almost read it in the twitch of his lips, the slow, methodical way that he moved at _that_ time.

_I killed you._

Oh, what it must have been like for him, to see the first failure in his entire career as a shinobi. She knows that her life being spared couldn't have been intentional. She had been meant to die, and he was going to smile over her body as she bled to death on a floor she had cleaned a thousand times, scattering salt every winter to strengthen traditional barriers. (_They keep no monsters out, you add, because you always seemed to be fighting them from inside the house. Perhaps, you think, they were made to keep the monsters **in**._) Her very existence was contradictory to the way things ought to be and she wondered how long it would be before time corrected its mistake and she disappeared into the floorboards and the warp of the wood.

_I killed you_, his eyes said to her.

Looking at the rubber in her hand and the tendons straining in her fragile wrist, she thinks it sounds an awful lot like a promise.

- - - - -

"You haven't been writing me," says Tsunade, scowling over a mug of tea in her hand and a basket of sweet bread. Mikoto smiles lightly, squeezing the rubber ball in her hand, knowing full well that the leader of her country is hung over, and that this is the perfect moment to bask in this fact. She doesn't know what devils drive the older woman to drink so much, but she will have an advantage. "You have to write me so that I can decide when to let you out."

Mikoto smiles wider, and grabs for one of the sweet bread rolls. "But if I don't write, it means that you have to come and see me instead of reading what I have to say." She chews the bread, thinking of mornings spent cooking breakfast, of chestnut cookies that Fugaku liked, of the soft fruit rolls that her mother made for her every morning. "And I do get lonely without you here to nag me, Hokage-sama."

Tsunade says nothing to that, but looks stone-cold in the white glow of the florescent lights. Her eyes are hard, but not unfeeling, like someone who is too tightly guarded and afraid to break something. (_But Tsunade breaks a lot of people. Perhaps she is just afraid to break you more_.)

"Call me Tsunade, if you would please. I feel a little older every time someone calls me Hokage." She snorts, writing something with a flourish and grumbling about meddlesome genin. "Besides, best I can tell, it's just you and me and a pile of paperwork. Shizune isn't here to be offended at our lack of protocol."

"You do not like it then," Mikoto states, "being called the Hokage, that is."

Tsunade frowns. "My teacher is the Hokage. My grandfather and great uncle were Hokage. It makes me feel like a kid in my mother's shoes to call myself Hokage, if you understand."

Mikoto understands perfectly well. At the age of seventeen, she had become the wife of the clan leader, the lady of the house. Barely done growing out of her childhood, Mikoto had become something of a figure head, and she hadn't (_hasn't_) known what to do since then, didn't (_doesn't_) know at all.

"So then let us speak of other things, since it is so uncomfortable to address stations such as ours," she says with a swaying grace, and she thinks of willows, something that she knows she is not. I fool you, she thinks, I fool you all and I will continue to do so. "What state is Konoha in? Who are the upcoming ninja that I should know about?" she asks with a smile.

Tsunade's face softens a bit, as if recalling something precious, something solely hers. Mikoto recognizes the motherly glance for what it is, and finds herself envying Tsunade her happiness again. (_What right does she have when she is so much older and you are so very miserable?_)

"Most of the genin children you would recognize are chuunin now, though there are a few exceptions," Tsunade begins, biting her bottom lip. "You were friends with Nara Shikato growing up, yes? Well his son, Nara Shikamaru, is a jounin now, even acts as an envoy to the Sand Country."

"How proud his parents must be!" she says, putting on her best face (_which is also the fake one, but you don't let people know that_.) She is happy, somewhere beneath, for Shikato and his son, but her opinion of how old and how young children on the battlefield ought to be, especially after all that has happened. She is proud of the quiet boy that she knew, but she does not feel that it is _right_, that it is _humane_. "I am sure that he does the village much good."

Tsunade smiles. "Certainly. He is both intelligent and compassionate, which makes him a capable leader. But he isn't the only one that I am proud of. Yamanaka Ino and Haruno Sakura have both begun apprenticeships under me to learn the medical arts."

"Then you are not only acting in office but teaching as well?" she asks.

Tsunade nods, and takes a long drought of her tea. "So I have."

She frowns. "But do you not fear that they will die? That they will go on a mission and will not come back? I mean, it isn't the same as sending your own children away, so maybe it is easier to do. How does that feel, to send someone away to somewhere they could probably die?"

For a moment, Mikoto is certain that she has offended Tsunade at last. The glass of tea sloshes messily across one of her papers, and Tsunade quickly mops it up with her haori, frowning and cold once again. Watching the stain spread across the green fabric, Mikoto feels strangely regretful, like she has ripped the covering brocade from over a mirror only to discover it's broken.

But at the same time, she is delighted to see a pain so similar to hers reappear on Tsunade's face, something that she has sorely needed to see for the past week.

"You are a very bitter woman, and I don't grudge you that," she hears, but does not see with her eyes rooted to the dark spot on Tsunade's clothes. "Maybe you blame the philosophy of the shinobi nations for what has happened in your own family. I cannot deny this is possible. But no matter what you might have decided is the fault of the state, it will never be easy for me to send people out, never as long as I can remember my loved ones. You, who have lost everything and have had no time to adjust to the idea, don't have the experience to understand that yet."

Mikoto winces, but nods. Tsunade softens at the edges, though she is not sure if that is because her eyes are squinted together or because Tsunade has left her stone-hard anger behind her.

"It wasn't easy to send a twelve-year old chuunin on his first mission as a leader because help was short. It wasn't easy to let a group of four genin to fight off experienced ninja from an opposing village because no one else would volunteer to help. It -_especially_- wasn't easy to let a kind boy leave because he feels that he failed as a friend and a shinobi to save _your_ youngest son." And this Tsunade says in a strained voice, trembling bands of sound wanting to speak someone's name. Her hands reach to her neck, as if looking for something lying in the cradle of her breastbone.

"Do not speak of not loving every ninja that passes through my office," says Tsunade, and Mikoto notices with each passing moment, she regains her strength, flourishing in her conviction. The woman that had looked so mournful just a moment before suddenly breaks the shell before Mikoto's very eyes. "Ninja are people, but they are also warriors, no matter how young, and it is a choice that they all make. I respect that decision, and cope by believing that they are capable."

There was a time that Mikoto had felt the same, newly graduated from the academy and ready to be remembered by history (_and how long ago that now feels!_). She remembers putting the bracers on Itachi's arm for the first time, feeling the tenderness of his arm (_a child's arm_) and wondering what made her son so brave and strong, and worrying if he would ever need her again, like he had needed her when he was sick or when he woke in the night, unable to sleep.

Well, she laughs to herself in a rasping voice, we all know how that turned out.

She sent her own children out, knowing fully well how important it was to them, and ashamed, Mikoto knows that she has no right to try and destroy what comfort Tsunade has found in knowing this.

"I've still not fully come to terms with the idea of sending people's children, people's parents and sister sand brothers out to a place where I know they can die, but _they _have, and that's all that really matters. What happened in the past, whatever decisions you've made or that the Hokage made, is still in the past. It won't change, but you _can_." Tsunade smiles, the kind of smile that Mikoto can only remember the Lady Hokage giving to a very select few people in her life. "Or at least so a little blonde haired brat tells me, whenever I get down on my luck."

Mikoto smiles to match Tsunade's, but this time it is not very bitter, but very hopeful.

"I know the hospital isn't the most thrilling place to be, much less in a ward filled with coma patients, but it will get better. You have to believe that," Tsunade says, and takes a sip of her tea which is now cold, unpleasant, and half empty. "Besides, you haven't told me whether or not you wish to go on active duty again or not. Maybe we can set you up with your own set of genin and get you back into the thick of things."

Tsunade lists off all the things that Mikoto could do with her present rank and strength, and Mikoto nods, listening appreciatively. The feeling that none of this will ever come true sneaks up on her and makes her feel like a liar with each answer, despite what lingering happiness she has.

- - - - -

Her grandfather, a man of some seventy odd years when she was just a child as Mikoto recalls, used to call all the granddaughters in the family "hime-sama", his little princess. In her youth, she had found this to be wonderful, a beautiful contrast to the calluses and scars on her paper-thin skin had been building up since she threw her first shuriken. She felt lovely in the arms of her grandfather, even with her gap-toothed smiles and uncombed hair saying otherwise.

"None are as lovely as my Mikoto-hime-sama, not a one from the western sands of the Wind Country to the eastern shores of the Water Country," he'd say, and tap her nose with his spindly Buddha fingers, his smile a crescent in his round face.

Reflected in the steel and aluminum of the hospital appliances, Mikoto has a hard time reconciling herself to be the same girl that her grandfather had thought to be so beautiful, even if the memory does bring a smile to her face. Quite simply, she is not beautiful, not the way that she was in the golden carriage uchikake and hair pins of her wedding night. They (_and anyone other than her or Tsunade is -always-_ they) have chopped off her hair, bruised her arms, paled her skin to blue, and dulled her eyes with narcotics. When she looks at her forearms, she sees angry welts and spider veins that pulse with each passing second.

No one is here to lie and call her beautiful anymore, not in the way she felt that it might be true.

"Uchiha-san, " says Kirie, smacking her blueberry gum between her teeth and pulling her blouse down, "wouldn't you like for me to trim your hair?" She them ruffles her own hair, as though comparing length and color. (_Kirie's, you note, always looks fake: bleached blonde and red and angrily sheared._) The scissors, even when coated in a cheerful pink plastic, wink wickedly from the side table. (_Not so wicked as to frighten, but you are unsettled all the same by the knicked blades, as though each pit in the metal were **wounds**_.)

"No."

Mikoto is surprised with her own answer, like she has betrayed herself with words, with _noise_ in the middle of her great silence. She ought to want her hair cut, to be restored to some sort of proper order, but strangely, she find that she doesn't want that at all. Reassuring herself, Mikoto nods. "I am fine with my hair the way it is now." Which is really a lie, because her hair is itching against her neck, rasping against her ears. The autumn has come inside to her with rice stalk locks that rattle in the artificial wind of the air conditioner.

I've done something to deserve this, she thinks, frowning with chapped lips (_they stretch, p u l l, **crack**_). This is some kind of joke at my expense. Closing her eyes, she believes it must be so, because she is not anyone's lady princess, but a barren dowager empress in exile. (_Board the train and fly away, because the castle burns tonight and all your kings and queens with it, you sing-song to yourself, in that hollow that you keep what remains of the old you in._)

"None are as lovely as my Mikoto-hime-sama," said her grandfather with the spindly Buddha fingers, and without a doubt, Mikoto knows that it was true then, but is false now.

- - - - -

She wakes to the feeling of her hair being pulled and trimmed, and for one moment, she is positive that she will never speak to Kirie again for cutting her hair without her consent. She had been ready to keep her shorn hair as a reminder of what had happened, and what would need to be done. However, it seemed she had been cut off at the end.

But Mikoto, always a ninja when (_now that_) she is not a mother, recognizes that the strokes of the blade against her hair are much to precise and quiet for the hands of her nurse, who always seems to gleam gold and silver with jewelry. There is too steady a hand for it to be the doctor, and it is much too still for the impatient Tsunade or her assistant.

She steels her heart against this person, and opens her eyes.

At first she sees nothing, but knows that she is sitting up, held in place by one leg that is care fully propped up against her back, and another that stretches out next to her. She watches this leg, with its well formed foot with carefully painted toe nails and bleached white leggings. It is warm against her own cool side, and unwittingly, she leans towards it.

"Please stop moving," says a hot voice against her neck, moist enough to make her shiver. The chill scissor blades make her jump in shock when they press against the same place.

She doesn't have to look to know who it is, even when the voice has aged since what she remembers and what she recalls from the nightmare of the weeks before. She knows, in the way that all mothers do, where her children are, and knows that Itachi is sitting behind her.

He moves soundlessly behind her, so quiet next to the frantic beat of her heart in her ears, sounding as the swell of the sea. The scissors press against her neck and skull multiple times, and she feels the layers of hair gently sliding down the slope of her shoulders. It itches, but she is well-disciplined enough to not flinch.

It doesn't stop the nausea, but not wanting to be jerked over the bed rail again, she swallows the bile in her throat.

"Why?" she asks, when she finally finds her voice, a weak trembling thing that hides behind a deceptive calm. "Why are you here?"

He moves to face her, all sleek lines, not wasting a single movement. He clips her hair even around her ears, and blinks a her, evaluating the length of her bangs with rough fingers.

"Haha-ue's hair is disorderly. You would not want your hair to grow back uneven, would you?" he asks coyly, the shadow of a smile lifting the corner of his mouth. He pulls her face forward to him, fingers hooked into her forelocks with a vice's grip, and breathing hotly against her face and ear, he says, "Good mothers like for their sons to help them, yes?"

She nods, feeling the sibilant hiss of his words tickle her and a lip catch against her ear.

"Then you should not tell anyone that I have been here, or else I might not come back," he says blandly, and Mikoto knows that he is quite serious.

And against all logic, Mikoto doesn't want him to go (_there's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place..._), because without him, what is there for her? Nothing, nothing, nothing, and now she nods yes, while he slips out of the room. It is as if he were never there to begin with. She clutches the cut hair between her fingers, sensing her lost resolve scattered amongst it, and weeps as quietly as possible.

- - - - -

To Be Continued

- - - - -

A/N: I thought I would never get this written, but sure as hell, here it is. Thank you so much to my reviewers! I've tried my best to respond to all of the reviews for the last chapter, but some of you escaped my radar when ff net was having technical difficulties. I shall try to answer questions and respond as best as I can to all of you on this chapter.

I've had a lot of health issues for the last couple of months, and as it were, my medication make sit incredibly hard for me to write anything that requires me to emote. As it were, I am presently in a mania, and quite capable of emoting. I'll try to be more prompt next chapter.

Reviews and constructive criticism are always welcome!


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